Michael Matt: Can you say something about the roots of all of this? How did the Church get to this point? Do you think Freemasonry played a part in the auto-destruction of the human element of the Church?
Bishop Schneider: It is obvious and logical. If we know what Freemasonry is, we know it is the anti-Church, exactly the opposite of what Christ founded, His Holy Church. It is the exact opposite. So the Church is the enemy of God and specifically of Christ. They present themselves as not against religion, of course, but they are against the uniqueness and exclusivity of Jesus Christ and His Holy Church, against divine revelation. Therefore, every clever and cunning enemy will try to eliminate and destroy their enemy. Freemasonry has declared, since the beginning of its existence, the Catholic Church as the greatest enemy par excellence. There are several affirmations from high-ranking Freemasons throughout history. This cannot be denied. This is not a conspiracy theory. These are effects and proofs.
The most efficient strategy to harm an enemy is to penetrate from within, like a virus in the body, destroying immunity and health. They did this. At first, they fought directly against the Church during the French Revolution, as a demonstration. Later, during different moments in Church history in Europe and Latin America, there were Freemasonic governments. Then they used a tool on a very wide scale to fight against Christ: the communist October Revolution. It is proven with documents that Freemasons in Europe gave logistical, financial, and other support for the October Revolution in Russia. Lenin himself was a member of several Freemasonic lodges in Europe, and his close collaborators, mostly Russian Jewish Freemasons, are all documented.
They used this tool to fight against Christ and the Church. We witnessed seventy years of war by communist dictatorships in Russia and Warsaw Pact countries against the Church. Now they have taken a more clever and cunning step. They began to penetrate the Church, and they have done this since the 19th century. We have some signs and indications, such as the famous Alta Wendt document. They penetrated seminaries and faculties with liberal ideas, which led to relativism: the belief that there is no stable and immutable truth. This is the core of Freemasonic ideology: that human beings are the authors of truth and can shape it according to their desires.
This became the core of modernist thinking: relativism, complete naturalism, and anthropocentrism. Freemasonry is by definition naturalistic, completely anti-supernatural, and anti-revelation. The shape of modernist thinking resembles Freemasonry. I would not say modernists were necessarily Freemasons, but their thinking was contaminated by this mode of thought. Since then, the modernist movement penetrated further into the Church and reached its peak at the Second Vatican Council. They used this Church assembly as a tool to promote relativistic, anthropocentric, and naturalistic theories in theology, liturgy, and pastoral life.
After the Council, modernists were further promoted. We cannot exclude the possibility that some high-ranking Church officials, like Bugnini, were actual Freemasons, hidden in parallel. Others were simply modernists with similar naturalistic and relativistic thinking. Some may have been convinced Freemasons in the ranks of the episcopacy, the cardinals, or even nuncios. They promoted modernist clergy who were not fully Masonic but shared their mindset to high positions in the Church.
This is a strategy. Now, with this pontificate, we are witnessing how evident heretics and deniers of Catholic truth are not only promoted to high-ranking offices but are, in some way, even rewarded for their betrayal of Christ and for promoting the spirit of this world in the Church.