Michael Voris: One last question, Your Excellency. I don’t want to make you late for your flight. Do you know what? You spoke in an interview a year or so ago in London, and you said that this is the fourth great crisis of the church. The three previous crises, in your view, are what?
Bishop Schneider: Yes, this is, according to my opinion, the first big crisis was, of course, the Arian crisis, and it is commonly accepted. It was a general crisis of the church, extremely grievous. Then the next was the so-called seculum obscurum, the dark century, the ninth and tenth centuries, when the papacy was occupied by immoral people of some Roman mafia. In those times, they put their sons on the papal throne. It was really a dark period, essentially a very deep humiliation of the Holy See, but God permitted this.
The next, according to me, is the crisis of the Avignon exile and with this the Great Western Schism. It was tremendous to have two popes at the same time, or three popes. It was really a big crisis. As part of this crisis of Avignon, it already started the crisis of the Renaissance papacy. So I would include these in some way as a branch, the scandals of the Renaissance popes and the causes that they adopted, the spirit of the world in those times, the humanism, the pagan humanism, which influenced the popes to open them to the world. They opened them to the world well.
Today, there is almost a general crisis of relativism reigning inside the church, doctrinal, moral, and tremendous liturgical anarchy. This is a very grievous crisis for me, but every crisis, God sends the solutions and his instruments. Often they were simple and started with hidden realities in the church, small and little ones. Time by time, God renews his church.
In our time, I can observe in many parts of the world the beginning of the renewal of the church, slowly but very clearly. This is the Holy Spirit, and nobody can hinder the Holy Spirit from acting, not even a cardinal, not a bishop. The Holy Spirit is using the little ones in the church to renew it. I hope that we will proceed with patience and with much faith in this work of the renewal of our Holy Mother Church.