Adrian Milag: Bishop, you’ve spoken of the need for a new syllabus of errors for our time. What urgent errors will need to be addressed?
Bishop Schneider: Yes, there are several, many points, but I would say within the Church, there are three main areas of doctrine which must be addressed by the Pope and clarified. First, that Christ is the only Savior, the only way for salvation, that no other religion is a way of salvation willed by God.
Only Christ is the one way that God gave and requires for all humanity. So there must be a statement with all possible clarity of the uniqueness of the way of Christ as salvation, and that other religions are not the will of God, do not correspond. God wills only one religion, this is the Catholic faith given by God.
Of course, other people can be saved also outside the Church, in other religions; this is another question. By God’s mercy and by God’s extraordinary ways, they can be saved, but not because they belong to a wrong religion, but because they have a pure conscience which only God knows, and they can be saved. This is the traditional teaching of the Church. So we have to avoid confusing these two elements.
So this is the first important issue. The second, all this which we now explain, I would call the divine order of creation of human sexuality, must be clearly stated again by Church teaching, all divine order, not Church; this is not a Church teaching, it is a divine teaching. It is a divine order.
The Church is not able to change the doctrine regarding homosexuality or other sins against the sixth commandment. This is the revealed truth. God revealed it in Holy Scripture and in the continuous, universal, ordinary, infallible magisterium of the Church through 2000 years.
It was said that all this, or any sexual act outside a valid matrimony, is a grave thing, a grave disorder, and is against the will of God, and puts people, when they purposely or with pride and unrepentantly commit these sins or lifestyle, in danger of losing their souls for all eternity in hell. This is a serious issue. Therefore, we must have a lot of compassion for these people who are advocates of homosexuality and LGBT. I have a lot of love for them and real compassion; they can lose their soul.
So this is the second issue. The third is the infiltration of a worldly feminism within the Church, concretely attacking the sacrament of Holy Orders, to infiltrate and in some way conquer Holy Orders for women, starting of course with the diaconate, starting female deacons, and then of course female priests, and not only priests, because they will not stop with the priesthood, they will go to the episcopacy, because the Holy Sacrament of Orders is one sacrament, one in three steps. So when they get the first step, they must go to the second and the third.
This is a growing influence and lobby within the Catholic Church by high-ranking bishops and cardinals. Recently, the president of the German Bishops Conference publicly, without shame, said that I like to see a woman priest at the altar, and he was not corrected. He is not punished. He is not advised. He is the president of the German Bishops’ Conference.
And other individual priests and cardinals speak in some way supporting female ordination. So I think these are the three main points that must be addressed in doctrine.
And then another area is the liturgy, the divine worship. There is a need again to restore the holiness of the Eucharist, the defense of our Lord, and the ineffable holiness and sacredness of our Lord. In the small, holy host, we must again restore all the honor to Him, also exterior protection and defense, because the Holy Eucharist is the heart of the Church.
When the heart is attacked, when the heart is weak, then the entire body has no strength. So I would characterize also one of the main spiritual sicknesses of the Church in our day, I would say in medical terminology, cardiothenia, Eucharistic cardiothusia, it would be a Eucharistic heart disease.
This is the wound, the deepest wound. Our Lord is trampled. Our Lord is desecrated in the Holy Eucharist, especially through communion in the hand, through such careless, superficial, minimal attention, honor, and defense. It is incredible.
We must restore all the honor and holiness to the Lord in the Eucharist, and only then will the Church be healed. Only then will there be a true renewal of the Church, and so it will last. Let us pray that the popes, Pope Leo or another pope, I do not know when, must start with the renewal of the Eucharistic faith, cult, worship, and adoration.