Michael Matt: Hello again, ladies and gentlemen. Michael Matt for Remnant TV, I have the honor of sitting here today with Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who is in town here in West Virginia for the Catholic Identity Conference. Your Excellency. Welcome. Thank you. I noticed that you have been traveling quite a bit lately. I think you came from the shrine in Wisconsin, Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine, where you offered the traditional Latin Mass.
Bishop Schneider: Every occasion for me to celebrate the traditional mass is a deep joy for me to have these occasions to celebrate the traditional mass, specifically also the most solemn form, the highest degree of solemnity in the church is the Pontifical High Mass. And so every time I am experiencing this beauty of the Church, which is giving to Christ in the liturgy the Most High all that the church can, she is giving to the Lord in this beautiful, solemn liturgy. It is not in this in the solemn pontifical mass, or in another Solemn Mass, the question of the priest or the bishop to honor, it is all details and vestments are appointed to Jesus, to him is to honor, honor to his name.
Michael Matt: Can I ask you to give me your opinion on what’s happening in the church, but what is happening to the church with respect to some of the questions that remain unanswered? For example, with the Dubia of Cardinal Burke and the four cardinals, and the question of Amoris Laetitia, do you see a potential abuse of the Holy Eucharist in this crisis that we’re going through right now with respect to married and divorced Catholics receiving the potential for that to happen, is that first and foremost, a concern for you over the Eucharist, being abused in that situation?
Bishop Schneider: Yes, of course. Now, this, we are witnessing a new situation in the church, where, officially, in some countries, officially by norms of the bishops’ conferences or diocesan bishops, people who are living in, objectively in A state of grave sin, mortal sin, and who are publicly living in adultery are officially admitted to Holy Communion. It has never been in 2000 years of the church in this way, by admitting them to Holy Communion. They are their manner of life is approved implicitly, and divorce is thereby improved implicitly, and the sins of adultery are approved implicitly by this admittance to the Holy Communion of these people and and so it is a general attack on the holiness and of the Holy Eucharist and of the meaning itself. What does the Holy Communion mean? Before it was through the communion, the practice of communion in hand, it had already been a very widespread, on a wide scale, profanation, banalization of the Most Holy Eucharist in its exterior form. It is very sad that so many sacrileges were committed and still are committed by this form of receiving Holy Communion.
But now we are witnessing a further step deeper, as I already explained, and so the most holy in the Church is the Body of Christ, of our Lord and Redeemer, his divine blood, his divine body. And in this way, in the midst of the church is perpetrating a desecration of the holiest of the holiest of holy and a profanation is perpetrating, and this can never bring a renewal of the church. St Paul is writing to the Corinthians, because you receive a. Unworthily the body of Christ, you were eating your judgment. He writes in the two Corinthians, Therefore, you had a lot of diseases. A lot of people died. So it was a punishment of God, because and so I cannot imagine that these horrible profanations Inside the life of the Church, which already are going on for 40 years or more, with this practice of the communion at hand, and also with receiving unworthily Holy Communion in the in the state of mortal sin, and now we are witnessing the culmination of this with the admittance of the official, public adulterers to Holy Communion. I think that this will have consequences.
And because God is holy, and this will have consequences, and therefore we have to make in the church acts of reparation, of expiation, of this and to that, this may stop. And the first task of the pastors of the church, the shepherds of the bishops and the Pope, of course, is to protect what is holy, what was entrusted to them, Christ entrusted to his apostles and followers and successors, the bishops, Pope, the bishops and the priests, what is most precious and they are. They have. They have to be faithful administrators of what is not their possession, which is what does not belong to them. The Holy Eucharist, the body of Christ, is not a property of the Pope, of the bishop, or of a priest. It is not. It belongs not to them. It is the Lord, and therefore, they cannot dispose of this as they want, and to adapt this to the spirit of the world. So it would be a betrayal of their task to be faithful administrators of the Most Holy Mysteries of God, and with God, we cannot make a joke and a play. He is too holy.
Michael Matt: Do you have any hope that His Holiness, Pope Francis, still may answer the Dubia and correct this, this crisis that you see coming with respect to the Holy Eucharist?
Bishop Schneider: There is always hope, of course, when we believe, and we have to pray for him. And therefore, last January, two Archbishops of Kazakhstan and myself we made a public appeal to all the faithful to pray for the pope that he may, in a very clear and unambiguous manner, forbid this practice of the communion of the divorced and adulterous. So, by well he could do this, he shall. He should do this. This is his task, his first task, to confirm, to strengthen his brethren in the entire church. This task Christ gave to Peter and to all his successors. And so this is his first task, to bring clarity to this very important issue of the church, the marriage, the Holy Eucharist. And so I hope we have to pray that God may illuminate him and give him strength to do this always. And so therefore, when miracles happen, so, there will be a miracle. Pope, friends will do this, but we have to believe in miracles and pray that the Pope may do this. We have to support him by our prayers, and so those bishops and people and laymen who.
Express their public concern about these very important issues, about the state of confusion in the church. They are really the Friends of the Pope. They are the true friends of the Pope, not those bishops and priests and lay people who are performing an adulation of the Pope and denying the evidence. We cannot deny the evidence. And this is why we have to be honest in the church, one with another and and so these actions, which were already made, several on the part of the Cardinals, some bishops, and lay people in the church, asking the Pope to bring clarity in this issue. It is an act of charity towards the Pope. It is really, ultimately an act of charity. And I am convinced that when the Pope appears before the judgment of God, and He will appear before every one of us, He will remind those bishops, Cardinals, and lay people who appealed to him, Holy Father, please answer.
Please bring clarity, and he will be thankful to those. But in the moment when the Pope will be before the judgment of God, those voices that only praised him and said, It’s okay, Holy Father. With the confusion, it is like the story with this, this French story, this French expression, Tou va tre bien, madame, la Marquise, it’s all okay in a disastrous situation, it is not honest, and they will not help the Pope when the Pope will be, and they own, when they will be judged by God. God will say, What did? What have you done when there was confusion? Why have you not raised your voice to defend the truth? And this is truly the spirit of family in the church. The church is a big family of God, with the Holy Father, the bishops, the priests, and the lay people; we are a great family. This spirit of family was very much stressed in the Council Vatican two and after the Council. And so in an inner family, we have to have the chance and the possibility even to speak some clear words without having to be afraid to be punished or to be isolated or to be criticized.
So we have to establish in the church this climate of family, even so, when sometimes some words are very clear and do not please those to whom we direct the words. But now, the Cardinals, some bishops, and the lay people who expressed their concern about the confusing situation regarding Amoris Letitia, and so on. They did this with respect to my knowledge, even very clearly with the evangelical parisia, as the Apostle said, but with respect and so I think this is, for me, a sign of the Holy Spirit in the church, that there are voices in all states of the church now, cardinals, bishops, priests, laypeople who try to help the Holy Father With these public forms of expression of their concern.
Michael Matt: And if the worst happens, I, for example, have, I have seven children, many, some of them are very, very little, still very young. And if Pope Francis does not answer, and this proceeds, and they even get to the point of maybe allowing gay unions and so forth. What do we do as family heads of families trying to keep the faith? What do we do?
Bishop Schneider: Yes, we have to stick to the truth which we know. We have to keep the truth that we know. And this is written in the Catechism, and this is untrue. Changeable. So we have to be, I think we have to change, in some way, our view of the ministry of the Pope. The Pope is not the church, and the faith is not the private property of the Pope. He is the only administrator. The faith belongs to the entire church. The Pope cannot say, Now, I will change this. I will make this. No, he is an administrator. He is the first servant, and this belongs to all the church. And so we have to keep on, to go ahead with the unchanging truth, which we know and do not know. And don’t be worried. We go ahead, because the church is ultimately not in the hands of the Pope, but in the hands of Christ. This we have to believe. And a concrete Pope, a singular Pope, is only temporary. He is not perennial. He comes, and he goes. But Christ is perennial.
The church is in his hands, the truth is perennial constant, and we know this, so we have to be more sure in our in our convictions, and so the pope cannot impose us a wrong doctrine in his quality as in his when he will would speak scattered that this is impossible, so this is a dogma of faith, then he will not do this. God will not permit this. Otherwise, the gates of hell would prevail over the church. But our Lord said to Peter, the gates of hell will not prevail against this rock, I mean, the Holy See of Peter, ultimately not. And so we have to believe in this even when, temporarily we are living in a darkness and when temporarily the Pope is not confirming us in the in the constant and unchanging truth of the church, we have nevertheless to pray for him and say and say, I know to whom I believe in whom I believe, I know, I know the Catholic faith. We have to be very sure and firm in our convictions.
Michael Matt: It seems that Pope Francis, the direction that he’s going in, to some extent, is in line with what Pope Benedict the 16th mentioned in his last speech to the clergy of Rome in 2013 when he said that this virtual Council, he’s referring to Vatican two, this virtual Council, this council of the media, has been responsible for so much damage, he said, for the closing of seminaries, for the destruction of the liturgy, use the word trivialized with respect to the liturgy that it’s become trivialized. Pope Francis, I would imagine, would defend himself by saying, What I’m doing is in line with the spirit of the council. So my question to you is, when do we get to the point where we can begin to admit that perhaps Vatican two simply failed? Is it possible that a future Council will just correct the entire Vatican Council and say it didn’t work? It failed in its objective?
Bishop Schneider: Well, first, it is a fact of evidence that after the council, there has been, until now, a deep crisis in the life of the church in every respect. So we cannot deny this. It is evident. And so we have to, and of course, therefore, there was a mistake in the interpretation of the council, firstly, but this wrong interpretation and implementation of the council was based partly objectively, in some ambiguous affirmations of the council; also, we cannot deny these. So And even so, the Popes tried after the council, Pope Paul the Sixth, Pope John Paul the Second, to correct some wrong developments, but it was not sufficient. Yeah, there was basically, I think the fault was that it was a rupture with the tradition. So the general impression of the spirit was that we now, we start a new a kind of a new era, a new church. And this is contrary to the spirit of the apostles, and of Christ, and of the entire tradition; the church is always the same. We cannot say now we start a New time in the church.