Bishop Schneider on “Homosexual Heresy”

Dedicated to “emerging doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues”, this thirty-page document immediately caused a shockwave in Catholic circles because of its scandalous call for a “paradigm shift” in the way basic doctrinal and moral truths are addressed.

A Global Sexual Ideology 

From the very beginning of his interview with Diane Montagna, Bishop Athanasius Schneider strongly denounced the general orientation of the report published by the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops.

The bishop believes that the Vatican is now participating in the spread of an ideology contrary to natural law and divine Revelation: “By publishing the Final Report of Study Group No. 9, the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops has stooped to promoting the propaganda of a global sexual ideology that is being aggressively pushed in politics and in the media throughout the world.”

The interview notably revisits the scandal caused by the inclusion in the report of the testimony of a man living openly in a homosexual relationship who, along with his partner, received a blessing from Fr. James Martin, an American Jesuit priest close to LGBT circles, the very day after the publication of Fiducia Supplicans. Bishop Schneider states in this regard: “Fr. James Martin is nothing more than a clerical henchman of this anti-Christian and blasphemous ideology.”

He continues: “The proponents of this ideology seek the moral and doctrinal approval of the Church for homosexual acts and lifestyles—that is, behaviors contrary to God’s creation and the natural order.”

Then he directly accuses the Synod Secretariat of collaborating with these pressure groups: “The Synod Secretariat — an organ of the Holy See — is thus collaborating with its lobbyists in a veritable revolt against God’s work of creation, against the beautiful and wise order of the two sexes, man and woman.”

Fiducia Supplicans and the Exegesis of Doubt

For Bishop Schneider, the report of Study Group No. 9 represents the logical culmination of a process that has been underway for several years in the Church: “The final report reveals that legitimizing homosexuality—that is, homosexual acts, lifestyles, and homoerotic relationships—was already on the clerical agenda during Pope Francis’ first Synod on the Family.”

The bishop believes that “this agenda reached its peak with the promulgation of Fiducia Supplicans by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the direction of its current prefect.” Bishop Schneider calls this Roman declaration “a parody of common sense. It raises the possibility of blessing same-sex couples, not officially and liturgically, but spontaneously. According to the document, the object of the blessing is the same-sex couple, not their relationship. But being a ‘couple’ stems precisely from the relationship itself. Fiducia Supplicans thus treats the whole world like fools.”

He notes that “the final report of Study Group No. 9 goes even further by proposing a possible doctrinal justification for homosexual acts and homoerotic relationships.” The bishop believes that this justification “does so by indirectly calling into question the enduring validity of the testimony of divine Revelation concerning homosexuality in Holy Scripture.”

Bishop Schneider then denounced what he called an “exegesis of doubt”: “The report actually states that ‘it is necessary to go beyond a simple repetition of their current presentation and to take into account the teachings drawn from various exegetical readings’ (2.4). Such an exegesis effectively usurps God’s place and presumes to proclaim what is good and what is evil. This is precisely what the serpent did in the Garden of Eden.”

The auxiliary bishop of Astana also considers it particularly revealing that the testimonies included in the report are exclusively those of people living publicly in homosexual unions, without giving a voice to faithful seeking to live in chastity in accordance with the teaching of the Church.

For him, “this fact speaks for itself”; this choice clearly reveals the orientation of the Study Group: “It clearly demonstrates that an organ of the Holy See — the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops — is taking sides with an ideological and neo-Gnostic group within the Church, a minority that explicitly contradicts the constant teaching of the Church and the sensus fidelium.”

Bishop Schneider believes the goal is extremely serious: “It is clear that the objective is to initiate a process to reinterpret and ultimately abolish the validity of God’s revelation—in particular that of the Sixth Commandment.”

Moral Relativism

The bishop acknowledges that the document does not formally have magisterial authority, but he believes that its official publication by the Vatican gives it considerable weight in Catholic public opinion: “Although it is formally only a document from a study group and has no magisterial authority, it is nevertheless published by the Vatican, through an organ of the Holy See. Consequently, such a document conveys to the whole world, and to most Catholics—who are unaware of the theological distinction concerning the weight of authority accorded to Church documents—that the Catholic Church, and even the Vatican, is now open to the possibility of legitimizing and normalizing homosexual acts and lifestyles.”

A gradual strategy is at work: “It’s a clear tactic aimed at gradually accustoming the faithful to considering homosexual acts as normal, or at least to tolerating them in individual cases.”

This evolution is often based on emotional or psychological arguments: “Primarily on the sophisticated argument that a homosexual couple can possess other good moral or intellectual qualities. Thus, the door is opened to total moral relativism.”

The auxiliary bishop of Astana believes that this “final report has unequivocally crossed the line separating orthodoxy from heresy. The report uses the seductive expression ‘paradigm shift’ to undermine, through empty rhetoric, God’s Revelation on the binary nature of the sexes, as well as His clear prohibition of any sexual act outside of a valid marriage between a man and a woman.”

Bishop Schneider further adds: “With scandalous audacity, the final report replaces God’s commandments—in this case, the divine commandment forbidding sexual acts outside of marriage—with human traditions that effectively open the door to the acceptance of homosexual acts and lifestyles.”

Rome’s Silence

To date, in the face of such a scandal, no reaction has emerged from the Successor of Peter. Bishop Schneider, however, believes that a clear intervention is essential: “The first duty of Pope Leo XIV is to protect the Church and the souls of the faithful against this shameless Gnostic doctrine, which seeks to justify fornication and unnatural vice.”

The bishop recalls the warnings addressed by Our Lord to the Churches of the Apocalypse: “The voice of Christ, who reproached the Church of Pergamum for tolerating the sexual heresy of the Nicolaitans (cf. Rev. 2:14-15) and accused the Church of Thyatira of allowing Jezebel — ‘who calls herself a prophetess’ — to spread sexual immorality in the Church (Rev. 2:20-21), is also addressed today to Pope Leo XIV.”

Bishop Schneider also warns against the silence of a significant portion of the hierarchy: “Homosexual heresy is increasingly infecting the Body of the Church; and if the Pope, along with the cardinals and bishops, does not wake up and, as responsible spiritual doctors and pastors, clearly and courageously warn the faithful to protect them from such spiritual contagion, they will be guilty of their inaction and silence.”

Then he adds this particularly serious statement: “It is quite possible that future generations, looking back on our time, will apply to it words similar to those used during the time of the Arian heresy: ‘The whole world groaned and marveled that the Sixth Commandment of God had been abolished.’”

For Bishop Schneider, the very foundations of natural and Christian morality are now being called into question. A public clarification from the Holy See, therefore, appears absolutely necessary.

The bishop states: “The final report, written in a typically sophistical and gnostic style, presents the immutable, holy, and most wise truths of divine Revelation as mere ‘theoretical models’ (cf. 2.3). In their report, the Church’s clear, infallible, and two-thousand-year-old teaching on the order of human sexuality willed and ordained by God is thus reduced to the status of a ‘model’ tied to a particular era.”

Bishop Schneider emphasizes the consequences: “This also deprives of their binding force the entire natural moral law that God has inscribed in the human heart, as well as the truths revealed in Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. The authors of the final report are those who, according to the words of the Apostle Jude, turn the grace of God into an occasion for debauchery (cf. Jude 4).”

And he issued this warning: “If the Holy See does not unequivocally condemn this final report No. 9, the entire clergy and all the faithful who are still truly Catholic will lose confidence in those who hold positions in the Vatican.”

The Consecrations of the SSPX 

When asked about the upcoming episcopal consecrations of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), scheduled for July 1st, Bishop Schneider believes that the current crisis in the Church makes the state of necessity invoked by the Society more evident than ever: “The current situation in the Church can only be described as a true state of necessity, which the SSPX rightly affirms. One would have to be blind not to see it.”

The bishop continues with a striking comparison: “Anyone in the Church who still denies this true state of necessity today is either spiritually blinded, or considers the naked emperor to be decently dressed—as in Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes —or behaves like the servant who, before the burning castle, cries out: ‘Everything is fine, Madame la Marquise!’”

Strengthen Your Brothers in the Faith

As Pope Leo XIV enters the second year of his pontificate and doctrinal confusion continues to worsen, Bishop Schneider states that he has only one piece of advice to offer the Holy Father: “I could not offer him better or more relevant words than those spoken by Our Lord to Peter, the first pope: ‘Strengthen your brothers in the faith!’ (Lk. 22:32).”

The bishop explains this mission in concrete terms: “This obviously means bringing clarity where there is confusion in the faith, clarity where there is ambiguity in the faith, and clarity where the faith is subverted. The Pope should recognize that the Church, as in the 2nd century in the time of St. Irenaeus, is infected by a Gnosticism which, like a fox, cunningly denies the validity and concrete nature of Revelation and the commandments of God.”

Bishop Schneider then quotes a long passage from St. Irenaeus in Adversus Haereses, which he considers particularly relevant today, notably this one: “These men gather old wives’ tales, and then, by violently detaching words, expressions, and parables found here and there from their proper context, strive to adapt the oracles of God to their unfounded fictions.”

The courageous bishop joined his voice to “that of countless simple and pious Catholics whom I constantly meet in various countries, who love the Pope with a truly supernatural love, but who, at the same time, suffer deeply from the lack of unambiguous affirmation of divine truths emanating from Rome, while heresies and blasphemies propagated by clerics—even bishops and cardinals—who are wolves in sheep’s clothing spread with impunity in the life of the Church.”

He finally renewed a solemn appeal to Pope Leo XIV: “Most Holy Father, listen to the voice of so many devout Catholics, simple priests and religious, children and young people who have been pushed to the periphery of ecclesial life by synodal structures, and even treated with contempt solely because they remain attached to the faith and the form of the liturgy handed down by their fathers; to the faith and the liturgy cherished by the saints; to the faith and the liturgy embraced and offered by the overwhelming majority of popes.”

Then: “Most Holy Father, do not primarily side with the bureaucrats and apparatchiks of the Church, supported by the powerful of this world, but listen to the little ones in the Church and stand with them: the traditional faithful and clergy who firmly adhere to the faith once for all handed down to the saints (Jude 3).”

And finally: “Most Holy Father, be for our time another Saint Leo: make a profession of faith of crystal-clear clarity, so as to strengthen the whole Church and dispel pernicious doubts and poisonous ambiguities, as your predecessor and namesake did in the past. Then the faithful of our time, as in the time of Leo the Great, will be able to say: ‘Through the mouth of Pope Leo XIV, Peter has spoken!’”