Gary Michael Voris: Well, first of all, Your Excellency, thank you very much for giving us the interview. We are racing from the airport; you are racing to the airport. Can I ask you? So many good Catholics feel such a sense of confusion in the Church these days. What is the cause of the confusion? Why is there so much ambiguity?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: The cause? We have to go back some time. It is not only that the cause came up at this moment, but we have to seek the remote causes. The remote causes are because we have been living already for fifty years inside a Church area in a climate of relativism, of doctrinal relativism, moral relativism, which was unfortunately propagated by a great part of the clergy in catechesis and so on. Relativism means that the ever-valid truths which Christ gave us and the Church transmitted unchangeably were not taught clearly. There was already a climate and environment in these past decades of relativism and of lack of clarity.
This topic, now, in these years, of family, marriage, and sexuality, is only a concrete revelation of the situation that we had. This concrete topic brought up all the situations in which we were living. There were topics that were not clear, but now, regarding family, marriage, and sexuality, there is no possibility of being neutral in the Church. Everyone has to decide: I accept the truth of God on these topics, or I will go with the current of the world.