Posted on 12/01/2023 8:53:05 AM PST by ebb tide
Whenever one prepares to meet people of high moral stature or rank, there is always a temptation to consider them also in physically grandiose terms. Britain was fooled by the media into thinking the late Pope Benedict XVI was the “Panzer Kardinal”, or “God’s Rottweiler”, and expected a personality to match only to discover, during his 2010 visit to the UK, a man whose gentleness and shyness served to conceal the inner steel of fidelity to the Gospel and a clarity of thought sharper than polished shards of obsidian.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider is a man in the same mould. Like Benedict, he is a slightly diminutive and softly-spoken ethnic German of warmth, humility and intelligence (he speaks seven modern languages and also understands Latin and ancient Greek). He is slightly schoolmasterly in appearance, of sublime good manners, and he bears an uncanny resemblance to Justin Welby, though his similarities with the Archbishop of Canterbury perhaps stop there.
Like, Pope St John Paul II, his faith was formed under oppression. He was born in the Soviet Union and his family would travel 60 miles under cover of darkness to attend Mass in secret. His mother, Maria, sheltered Blessed Oleksa Zaryckyj, a Ukrainian priest martyred by the Communists in 1963, and for a while his family was incarcerated in a labour camp. They escaped to West Germany when Anton (Athanasius is the name adopted upon joining the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross of Coimbra) was 12 years old.
Now once again in the former Soviet Union as Auxiliary Bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan, his opportunities to travel are restricted but he has made two foreign trips in as many months. The first was to launch his latest book Credo: The Compendium of the Catholic Faith, a catechism commissioned by the US-based Sophia Institute Press. It follows the question and answer format of the Penny Catechism and includes additional sections on such recent questions as ideology of gender, New Age practices and Freemasonry and it sold out of its first print run of 17,000 copies within six weeks.
His second trip was to deliver a lecture on “political authority and the duties of conscience” to students at Cambridge University. I caught up with him the next day at the city centre Church of the English Martyrs and asked him what Cardinal Robert Sarah, the former prefect of the Congregation of Divine Worship, meant when he warned the audience at his book launch that the Catholic Church has entered a “crisis of the Magisterium”.
“He was simply stating the evidence,” said Bishop Schneider. “In this pontificate we have had several acts which have not corresponded with the teaching of the previous Magisterium and this is a crisis.”
He said the assertion of the validity of religious pluralism by Pope Francis in Abu Dhabi, when the Holy Father suggested that God not only permitted non-Christian religions but willed them too, was one example, and another was the sanctioning the Argentine bishops to permit divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion.
In his remarks, Cardinal Sarah also asserted that the “authentic Magisterium” would never disappear in spite of such errors, but the problem is, Bishop Schneider points out, that in the meantime they are causing a lot of confusion.
It is a blessing, he adds, that Francis chooses not to engage the “definitive Magisterium” when introducing such novelties, eschewing in his characteristically idiosyncratic and autocratic style the existing mechanisms to promulgate doctrine as “rigid”.
Francis instead adopts a deliberately ambiguous approach to doctrine, but to Bishop Schneider this represents an essential failure to exercise the Petrine ministry.
“The nature of the office of the Pope is, as Jesus Christ said to Peter, ‘Strengthen your brethren in the faith.’ This is his first task,” he explains.
“All acts or words which are not strengthening the faith but are contrary to it, or weakening the faith or confusing the faith, are contrary to the papal ministry because the ministry of Peter is the sign of reference in the Church, of unity of faith and in governance.
He agrees with Cardinal Sarah that the absence of a lack of clarity has created “a cacophony” of contrary and conflicting voices.
“It’s a situation in the Church where you are hearing almost daily contradictory voices among the bishops and that’s contrary to the Catholic faith. There is only one faith.
“The effect upon the faithful is that they are scandalised by these contradictory voices and they are confused. They don’t now know what the truth is and that is a very harmful effect upon the entire Church.
“This confusion and ambiguous language, especially in the field of morality, also means that people are losing the sense of good and evil. It is the morality of the world. The Roman Catholic Church is becoming (like) one of many organisations of the world by not distinguishing itself from the views and agenda of the world.
“It is now happening in the promoting of this moral relativism and adopting the language of the world and its morality regarding the truth of good and evil and the uniqueness of the unchanging nature of the truth.”
He added: “The effect is also that other people who seek the truth – let’s say non-Catholics or non-Christians who looked upon the papacy as an institution which gave certainty and clarity – cannot orient themselves to Rome.”
New generations of Catholics can hardly be blamed, therefore, if they turn in greater numbers to tradition where they find beauty and truth “expressed in a strong way”, according to Bishop Schneider.
On Sunday 26 November, Bishop Schneider celebrated a Pontifical Low Mass in Milton Keynes at St Paul’s Catholic School, after which he gave a talk, promoted by the Latin Mass Society, entitled: “Restoring All Things in Christ.”
The increasing numbers of young people to the traditional Latin Mass, in particular, is to him a manifestation of a supernatural movement of divine origin because it “demonstrates the longing for the sacred”.
He said: “The Latin Mass gives an atmosphere of greater supernaturality and the beauty is attracting them.
“If a young person converts, they don’t want to be half of something,” he says. “They want to be authentic. These young souls desire to be authentic. If I convert from this world I don’t like to see part of the world in the Church and in the liturgy.
“This is a phenomenon which is so clear. You can go all over the world and on Sundays, where there is a traditional Latin Mass the churches are packed with young families and with children. It gives us hope in the future.”
Bishop Schneider described Summorum Pontificum, the 2007 apostolic letter of Pope Benedict that liberated the Latin Mass, as an “epochal document”, but he suspects that Traditionis Custodes, the 2021 motu proprio of Pope Francis that sought to roll back such reforms, will not stand the test of time because the young want tradition.
He said: “Traditionis Custodes is not effective. It cannot stop this. The traditional Latin Mass is such a treasure of the entire Church. A single pope is not able to stop this.”
That does not mean that Francis will not try, and we come to the treatment of the Rt Rev. Joseph Strickland, who in November was fired by Pope Francis after, among other things, refusing to implement Traditionis Custodes in the Diocese of Tyler, Texas.
“This will go down in history as a great injustice against a bishop who did only his task in a time of confusion,” said Bishop Schneider.
“Now it is silenced, this voice,” the bishop said. “That was the evident, clear intention.”
“I consider this a huge, blatant injustice which was committed,” he continued. “He was a kind of prophetic voice, but he was for many in the Church an obstacle and they wanted to remove this unpleasant voice from them. This is the cause. We have to be very honest.”
He said: “At the same time he (the Pope) is not removing, and in some cases is promoting, cardinals and bishops who are publicly distorting or undermining the faith … those bishops who openly promote LGBT ideology, he is not touching them.
“It is an evident sign and demonstration that he has another intention – an intention to silence and to stop those communities and bishops in the Church who are still faithful and attached to the faith and the tradition of the Church and her liturgy. It is a kind of internal persecution.”
He is equally forthright about the Synod on Synodality. I asked him would any good come out of it and his answer was a flat “no”.
Part of his reasoning comes down to semantics and the meanings conveyed. In the Orthodox as well as the Catholic Church, a “synod of bishops” has always been precisely that, but in the October gathering in Rome the Pope gave voting rights to lay Catholics, putting them on a par with the bishops, the authentic interpreters of the Magisterium.
Again, in Bishop Schneider’s eyes it revealed an agenda, an egalitarianism at odds with the divine constitution of the Church. The result of the synod, he said, was nothing less than an “artifice of ambiguity”.
Further problems within the Holy See are evident, he says, from the partial treatment of Fr Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian artist expelled by the Jesuits after he was accused by about 25 women of sexually abuse.
His subsequent incardination into his home Diocese of Kloper, where he is free to practice his priestly ministry, suggested that a friend of the Pope, if accused of heinous moral failures, might receive “privileged treatment” instead of the punishment.
Faithful Catholics, he said, must respond to such crises with an international “crusade of prayer”, imploring God to restore the Holy See as a “sign of clarity” which strengthens the faithful “unambiguously in the truth”.
The alternative would be to see the Church divided between those who adhere to the “authentic Magisterium” and those who prefer the novelties of the new, and in that direction lies the way of schism.
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He said: “Traditionis Custodes is not effective. It cannot stop this. The traditional Latin Mass is such a treasure of the entire Church. A single pope is not able to stop this.”
That does not mean that Francis will not try, and we come to the treatment of the Rt Rev. Joseph Strickland, who in November was fired by Pope Francis after, among other things, refusing to implement Traditionis Custodes in the Diocese of Tyler, Texas.
“This will go down in history as a great injustice against a bishop who did only his task in a time of confusion,” said Bishop Schneider.
Ping
Redoing a Church toilet once, decade ago, back and forth to the car full of tools, cussing under my breath, saw a monk walk by with this little old smiling foreign humble priest that barely spoke English....I just blew passed them, doing my ‘critical’ job, like an idiot. Missed out on getting to meet Bishop Schnieder. That’s what self-importance that leads to justifying cussing to yourself doing a needed job gets you: missing out on Christ’s love from other folks. Got the toilet fixed, but big deal as I missed an encounter.
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