Fr. Daniel: You are someone whose family and you grew up in the Soviet Union. Your parents were part of that underground church and really faced those sufferings and persecutions firsthand. When Diane Montonya asked you how you felt when the Berlin Wall fell, you said to her, quote I had a deep joy that finally this atheistic system had collapsed. However, I could not have imagined that the breakdown of this atheistic system would usher in a worse situation in Europe, which is now before us, the dictatorship of gender ideology. This is really a dictatorship. It is actually the same method as in communist times. That is a powerful, fascinating observation. How do you mean, your excellence, that you see those same methods as in communist times with this dictatorship?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: This is evident. We have seen this already for decades, increasingly in recent years in Western countries, especially Europe, in the United States, and other countries of Latin America, where they introduced cunning, dictatorial laws, very cunning, the so-called laws of hate speech. So when you simply defend common sense, natural law, family, and say homosexual relationships are against nature, against reason, which is simply evident, you are punished in Europe, even with prison. We had a case of a former minister in Finland, a believing Lutheran lady. She once quoted the Bible publicly, saying that homosexual acts and relationships are a sin. She was accused of hate speech and had to go through many judicial trials up to the latest appeal court. Fortunately, she was absolved, but she had to endure years of humiliation.
This is now evident as a method similar to what the communists did in my time. For example, they did not always use the word hate, but sometimes they did. When you were against the communist system, they said you were hating them or an enemy of the Soviet Union. Being an enemy is almost the same as being hated. Under Stalin, people, priests, and others were condemned simply for being enemies of the people. So these hate speech laws are almost the same as the communist laws of enemies of the people. Without any appeal, people were condemned.
The communists promoted a theistic, materialistic ideology from kindergarten, from the very young up to the university. We see the same scenario today in almost all Western European countries and Latin American countries. From kindergarten, children are already exposed to this agenda very clearly. For me, this is a new, I call it Neo-Marxist, Neo-communist gender ideology dictatorship in Western countries. We must protest against this. We must unmask it as dictatorial, as totalitarian, and unite all people of good will and common sense to make alliances, even political, against this new dictatorship, the Neo-Marxist gender ideology dictatorship, to save human beings, to save families.
Fr. Daniel: Yes. It has been such an immense propaganda effort in the West. It is interesting. You mentioned how Neo-Marxist and Neo-communist it is. I have even heard Catholic scholars call it Neo-Gnostic because of the dualism Gnosticism presents between body and soul, body and spirit, and how transgenderism is a newer manifestation of such a heresy.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, this is, of course, Neo-Gnosticism. That is a very good observation. The Gnostics 2,000 years ago had one of their pillars as the so-called androgyny. It means a being where there is no difference between the sexes. They said you must overcome the difference of the sexes and create a new being that is at the same time male and female, androgenic. This is pure gender ideology as we see today. This is also Neo-Gnosticism.