Robert Moynihan: I’m Robert Moynihan, the founder and editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, and I’m pleased to have with me today Bishop Athanasius Schneider. It is February 16, Monday, 2026, and Bishop Schneider is in Astana, Kazakhstan. Welcome, Bishop Schneider.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Thank you. God bless you.
Robert Moynihan: We are coming together at a moment when there are many tensions in the Church. You are one of the bishops who have followed and written for 10 or 15 years or more on these questions. You are a kind of standard in the Church for faithful orthodoxy, and you have even been criticized by some on the far traditional side for keeping all lines of communication open with modern Rome.
Do you find your position a delicate one? You recently met Pope Leo yourself. We would like to ask you, how do you see your position, and how was your meeting with Pope Leo the 14th?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: First, I must say that every Catholic bishop, when he is Catholic, must have the desire and the joy to have communication with the Pope, who is the successor of Peter and the visible head of the Church, independently of some evident defects or limitations of the person who is currently holding the office of Peter. During 2000 years, there were different popes who had even problems and so on.
We must distinguish the office of Peter, which is divine, and the person who is temporarily occupying it. Nevertheless, we must always remember what Saint Leo the Great said. He coined a phrase that in spite of the indignity of the successor of Peter, the dignity of the office of Peter continues to exist and to operate, even in unworthy successors.
We have to look at this with a supernatural vision. Of course, we must also avoid the other extreme, which is a kind of exaggeration of personal veneration of the Pope, a kind of personal cult, and a kind of divinization of this person. This is not correct and not Catholic. It is worldly and anthropocentric and must be avoided.
There was an accumulation of exaggerated papal veneration in the sense of a personality cult, or what they call papolatry, or divinization of the person of the Pope, not directly but implicitly. It was present and accumulated in the last centuries. This was not a healthy development, and we must return to a very balanced and sober attitude toward the Pope, as it was, for example, in the Church Fathers in the patristic era.
There was a combination of veneration but also the awareness that we can and sometimes must, on some occasions and in some circumstances, give admonitions to the Pope with reverence, and that popes can and did make errors, not ex cathedra, of course, this is impossible, but in some ordinary affirmations of the ordinary Magisterium. This also happened in their policy and disciplinary decisions.
I wanted to stress this in the beginning to distinguish it clearly. Therefore, coming now to your second question, I was happy to meet Pope Leo. It was December 18 last. I requested the meeting, and the Pope graciously granted it to me. It lasted more than half an hour. I was very pleased. The Pope was very kind, attentively listening to me, very fraternal and simple. I felt free to present to him what seemed to me necessary.
Robert Moynihan: This is a wonderful moment to go through that meeting as much as you can. You directly met with Pope Leo the 14th. Many people are supporting him. They think he is an Augustinian priest who is bringing more order and balance into the Holy Office of Saint Peter, the Petrine office, in contrast to some confusion in past years.
At the same time, he is under sharp criticism for some of the choices he has made, some of the bishops he has approved, and some people are even encouraging the idea of detaching themselves from Pope Leo.
Your half hour with him is important to go through. Can you sketch the issues step by step? How did you arrange the meeting, and how did you begin it?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: As I said, I requested the meeting, and it was granted to me because I felt in my conscience, as a bishop, that I had to express my concerns and give him my fraternal advice. This is also my task as a bishop and a member of the College of Bishops, to give Peter fraternal advice. We are brothers, and we must be concerned with the good of the entire Church.
I said to him, Holy Father, I came for two motives. First, to ask you to strengthen the entire Church in the faith, as the Lord said to Peter and to every Pope. Then I told him that I had prepared a draft for a possible text, a kind of solemn profession of faith, similar to what Pope Paul VI did in 1968 with the so-called Credo of the People of God. It was an excellent and very necessary text in 1968. Even Archbishop Lefebvre at that time praised it very much. It was truly a help.
Unfortunately, the good text of Paul the Sixth from 1968 basically remained only a letter. The Pope himself did not demand clearly enough from the bishops and priests that they concretely accept this text or make an oath of this kind. You can write a beautiful text, but when there are no actions to implement it, it does not help, and it did not help.
Secondly, unfortunately, Paul the Sixth and the Holy See at that time, and continuing until our time, allowed a great wound in the Church, the appointment of unworthy bishops. I must stress this very much. It is a wound in the Church. Unworthy cardinals who were known as promoters of modernism and liberalism were nevertheless promoted to strategic sees and offices in the Vatican and outside. This is very serious, and we cannot remain silent about it. It is one of the concrete causes of the ongoing crisis in the Church.
I repeated to the Pope that this is his first task, at least to make a profession of faith. In our time, we need it. I proposed to him a draft with concrete points regarding doctrinal errors that are widely spread in our time or preached in an ambiguous manner. This was my first motive. I said it openly to the Pope and left him my draft.
Then I said the second motive, Holy Father, I came to ask you for liturgical peace in the Church, to grant the same rights and the same dignity to the traditional form of the Roman rite and the Novus Ordo, the current form, and to let them peacefully coexist.
I even said, Holy Father, when you do this, it will go down in history as the so-called Pax Liturgica Leonina.
Robert Moynihan: The liturgical peace of Pope Leo, a Leonine liturgical peace.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: He was smiling when I said Leonina. I think he understood the expression. I also presented him a draft for a possible document, but I asked him not to do a motu proprio, because it would not be fitting or appropriate. We have the well-known historical motu proprio of Benedict the Sixteenth, Summorum Pontificum, by which he basically freed the entire Latin liturgy of tradition without limitations. I say basically, because even then, some bishops could and unfortunately did limit the application of Summorum Pontificum.
Then came the contrary motu proprio, Traditionis Custodes, of Pope Francis. So I said it would not be fitting to issue again a motu proprio that would appear as an opposite to a previous one. It would be more fitting to issue a form of papal document that stands above motu proprios, something more solemn.
For example, I mentioned the possibility of an apostolic constitution. This was the form by which Pius the Fifth implemented the Roman Missal and the Roman rite in the Western Church, with the exception of rites that had existed for more than 200 years. Also, Paul the Sixth implemented his liturgical reform in 1969 with an apostolic constitution. So I mentioned this only as an example.
I offered the Holy Father a draft. These were the two motives I came to present to him. He himself told me that he had met young people who said to him that they had their conversion to God thanks to the traditional Latin Mass. I was surprised to hear this from his own voice. For me, this was a sign that he has some sensitivity to this topic, because he mentioned it to me spontaneously.
Robert Moynihan: This is very significant. What you are speaking about is historic, and we are speaking live. You are proposing a solution to a complex and painful division that has extended now for 60 years, since the Second Vatican Council.
The first question was the doctrine of the faith. You proposed a kind of catechetical summary against relativism and modernism.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, catechetical, but also a solemn profession of faith. It would be more than catechetical. It would be a solemn act of the Magisterium of the Church.
Robert Moynihan: Then you take up the mind of Benedict the Sixteenth, who believed that the old liturgy was beautiful. He said there was nothing negative about it in the sense of being encrusted with ritual. It carried devotion, love, and adoration of God, which in some way was diminished by a horizontal approach to the liturgy that was intended to bring it closer to the people and make it more appreciated. In the end, it seemed to diminish the splendor and holiness of God.
Benedict, on July 7, 2007, made this one of the first great issues of his pontificate, allowing the old rite. This continued until Pope Francis, who was advised that it was causing divisions in parishes and creating two types of Catholics. He wanted to restrict the old rite to a great degree.
You are now proposing to Pope Leo, in a half-hour meeting on December 18, not another motu proprio, but an apostolic constitution, on the same level as the document used in 1570 to codify the Tridentine Mass and the same level used in 1969 to promulgate the new order of the Mass.
How can this solve the problem we are facing?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes. In my written form, I also mentioned in the introduction that pluralism, the pluralism of liturgical forms, has always in the Church since the beginning. It is a kind of natural expression of the Church, and therefore it is completely wrong, unhistorical, and even against, I would say, the natural expression of the life of the Church to state, as Pope Francis did, that there must be only one liturgical form to guarantee unity. This is, I repeat, completely wrong. It is historically wrong. The Church never did it in 2000 years. Therefore, it is a statement that also contradicts reality, because in the current time, there are different uses or forms of the Roman Rite valid in the Catholic Church, in the Roman Church.
Besides the traditional Latin form, there is the so-called rite of the Anglican Ordinariate. This is its own use, which the Holy See approved, and Francis himself approved it. So why did he say there must be only one Novus Ordo when he himself approved in 2013, in the first year of his pontificate, another variant of the Roman Rite, the ex Anglican use for the Ordinariate Mass, the so-called? There are differences with the Novus Ordo. This is one example.
The second is the so-called Mass of Zaire in Congo. There is a Holy See-approved, quite different use of the Roman Rite. Then we also have the Dominican Rite, which is still approved by the Holy See. It is not abolished.
So you see, this statement that there must be only one form of expression, the so-called Paul VI Missal, is even against the present reality in the Church, not to speak of the reality in history. And this intolerance toward a variety of traditions and approved forms of worship and liturgy has always caused harm to the Church throughout history. Therefore, the Church must learn from history not to repeat it.
I would mention two historical examples of this harmful intolerance of Rome against a variety of rites. In the 16th century, the Holy See imposed on the so-called Thomas Christians, who had an oriental rite from Syria, the Syriac Rite, and the Latin Rite. This caused a division at that time, a schism, which was not necessary. They would have remained in union with Rome, but because they were stripped so violently of their traditional rite, some of the Thomas Christians preferred their rite rather than union with Rome. It was violence.
Another example is from the Orthodox Church. In the 17th century, Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, in a synod with the Tsar, made a liturgical reform. They created a kind of Novus Ordo for the Byzantine liturgy. A part of the faithful and priests did not accept this reform and asked to continue with the traditional form that had been celebrated for centuries in Russia. They said, why can we not continue with it? The patriarch was so intolerant that he categorically forbade it, perhaps with similar arguments to those used by Pope Francis, saying that unity could be guaranteed only by having exactly the same official reformed liturgy.
Therefore, they went into schism, the so-called Old Believers, or Old Ritualists, in Russian Staroveri. They were expelled and exiled to Siberia very cruelly by the Tsar. They accumulated such hatred and separation from the mother Church in Moscow that it lasted until our days. Later, in the 19th century, the bishops said, why were we so intolerant? We can call them back. They began to invite the Staroveri to return, saying, come back, you can use the old rite, no problem. But it was too late, because they were already living in such separation, physically and psychologically, that only a small part returned. They were called Yedinovertsy, those who have the same faith.
Since the 19th century until now, the Russian Orthodox Church has had no problem when someone, even a bishop, celebrates the so called old rite. I sometimes speak with Orthodox Russian bishops in our day, also in Kazakhstan. They have said to me that it was a great error. They ask why there was such intolerance in the 17th century. And now the Vatican repeats the same story, basically as with the Thomas Christians and as with Patriarch Nikon and the Old Ritualists.
Why do we not learn from history? This is my question. Why?
Robert Moynihan: You are touching on several extremely important points. What our audience may not realize is that you grew up in the Soviet Union. You are from a German background, Schneider, but your family was the Volga Germans, who had been transported from Germany into the heartland of Russia. Yet you retained your Catholic faith. You also have deep knowledge of the Russian Orthodox faith because you lived there. Later in life, you studied in Germany, and now you have a global apostolate, even though you are the auxiliary bishop of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is a huge country. In the south, there are many Muslims, and yet Russian Orthodoxy and the Russian language are very prominent and deeply integrated into the Russian Federation. Kazakhstan is a close ally of Russia, along with Belarus, the three together.
From this comes the question of the conversion of Russia, the prophecy of Fatima, the rise of communism and atheism, the destruction of the faith in Russia, the murder of the czar, and then the murder of bishops and monks of the Russian Church. There is also the whole question of modernism in the modern world, a kind of Marxist, Leninist, communist materialism that in the woke culture of the West has emerged as a great enemy of the Church.
Therefore, the unity of the Church must be retained for human reasons, because if it disintegrates or weakens, it weakens the Church before the great powers of this world, and also for reasons of faith, because we have one Christ, and in Him we are one. This is the motto of Pope Leo XIV. You had a meeting with him. Did any of these other aspects of the question come up, for example, whether the Orthodox might appreciate a reopening toward the old liturgy or similar matters?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: No, they did not. The meeting was very limited. I spoke about other issues, but I have to say that when Pope Benedict XVI issued the motu proprio in 2007, I remember that Russian bishops and priests came to me to congratulate me. They said, we congratulate you that your Church has found the liturgical tradition of her own heritage again. They were happy and congratulated me.
Robert Moynihan: Let me explain this further. The Orthodox use what we call the Byzantine liturgy, which was authored and arranged by Saint John Chrysostom around the year 400 AD in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. The Church was one at that time. It was a Greek-speaking liturgy. In the West, they were using Latin, but they were one Church.
After the schism in 1054, the liturgy of the Byzantines became the liturgy of the Orthodox, but it remained very similar to the Latin liturgy in the West. That continued through the last thousand years, with the Orthodox celebrating the deepest mysteries of the faith in the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. We accept that liturgy and believe it is legitimate. We shared that liturgy for six hundred years until the schism, and we still have that liturgy in the Eastern rites. The Ukrainian Greek Catholics celebrate the Byzantine liturgy. It is part of our Church.
In the Novus Ordo, however, a Western-oriented spirit, a democratic spirit, a modernistic spirit, a horizontal and secular spirit, entered through some fissure, as Paul VI said, into the Church and into the new order liturgy. Then experimentation and clown Masses and similar practices led to a loss of splendor, dignity, and solemnity in worship, which had been traditional for our Church and remains traditional in the Orthodox Church.
Reflect on this for a moment. Do you think we will be able to restore things and enter a new period of splendor?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: I hope that this will come, because the Church is in the hands of God. Until the Second Vatican Council, the Church truly had a splendor in the liturgy. She received it from the splendor of the Old Testament temple liturgy, which was divinely established, not human. The prescriptions for the temple liturgy were very solemn. The spirit, not the details, but the spirit of awe, reverence, and theocentrism, was kept by the apostles. This is the apostolic spirit.
When we read the Apocalypse, the liturgy is described with great detail, especially with reverence, awe, silence, and sacredness. This is an example of the liturgy of the first Christians, the liturgy of the Apocalypse. John wrote it. From there it grew and developed like a tree, like a flower, growing toward beauty. The Holy See and the Holy Spirit guide the Church, as our Lord said, into the fullness of truth, not only the fullness of doctrinal truth but also the fullness of truth in worship. It grows.
The Byzantine Church, I must say, did not invent the liturgy through John Chrysostom. He found an already existing traditional form and enriched it somewhat. It was always celebrated, even in Rome, in Grottaferrata, in Greek, before and after the separation. In Rome, there were churches where it was always celebrated in Greek. The Popes preserved elements of Greek in the papal liturgy. The readings had to be proclaimed in two languages, Greek and Latin. In this way, the Holy See preserved it.
Then came the great rupture and revolution after the council with the so-called Mass of Paul VI, which was, as you mentioned, more horizontal, Protestant in style, anthropocentric in style, and doctrinally ambiguous. It was shaped more as a meeting of people. Even when one reads the rubrics in Latin, in the Latin form of the Novus Ordo, and considers the offertory prayers taken from Jewish meal blessings and introduced by Bugnini, the meaning of sacrifice was weakened. This is serious. We must state it.
Robert Moynihan: You are making very profound critiques now of the Novus Ordo.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: We cannot remain silent. We cannot continue to remain silent. I repeat, we must state it for the sake of honesty.
Robert Moynihan: Do you feel that Pope Leo is sensitive to this? You had a half-hour meeting with him, and now you are watching as he tries to decide what to do about the SSPX.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: I hope that he has understanding for this. I do not know whether he already perceives the real crisis, the extent of the crisis. I doubt somewhat whether he truly perceives the real doctrinal crisis.
Robert Moynihan: Did you try to express that?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes. I said to him, Holy Father, allow me to indicate five wounds of the Church in our day. I said the first wound is the wound of doctrinal confusion and religious error, and therefore, I asked him to issue a motu proprio as a remedy. The second wound is the wound of liturgical anarchy, a liturgical anarchy united with a liturgical war against the traditional form of the Roman Rite, a war united with anarchy. As a remedy, I suggested giving the pacific coexistence of both forms with no restrictions, so that bishops would not have the power to restrict the traditional form of the Mass in the same way as they cannot restrict the Novus Ordo. Both forms should be on the same level.
The third wound, I said, Holy Father, is the wound of unworthy, worldly bishops and cardinals, who are the new Sadducees of today, collaborating with the agenda of the political and ideological elites of this world.
Robert Moynihan: What was his reaction?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: He listened carefully. When I spoke about the first wound, the extremely deficient priestly formation in seminaries regarding doctrine, morality, and liturgy, he indicated agreement with a slight bow of the head, showing that he understood. The fifth wound is the de facto abolition of the strict cloistered life of nuns because of the document of Pope Francis, Cor Orans, which obliges cloistered nuns to leave the cloister for formations, travels, and federations. Regarding these five wounds, it seemed to me that the Pope showed understanding.
Robert Moynihan: Here, you have a profound difference of opinion between those who believe that prayer, sacrifice, and living in a convent, praying for others, the Church, and for peace, are eternally and usefully real, and activists who think that all of that is in some way artificial, and that people should instead be running soup kitchens or hospitals. Contemplative prayer, a kind of union of mind and heart with God, is not seen as real. This reflects the mentality of the modern world, that by doing we carry out the Gospel, not by being.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, exactly. And we know that Pope Leo XIII coined the famous expression in this context, the so-called heresy of action. This is ideologically united with the heresy of Pelagianism, where Pelagius basically abolished grace and put all emphasis on nature. This is so dangerous. Pope Leo, being Augustinian, must have the sensibility to Pelagian errors, against which Saint Augustine fought until the end of his life.
Robert Moynihan: That’s right. Augustine and Pelagius wrote letters against each other, saying, “You are wrong, you’re wrong for this reason,” etc.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Not exactly. Augustine did not write so many letters against Pelagius himself. He wrote against other disciples of Pelagius, who promoted his heresy, and other bishops. Bishop Julianus of Aclanum was one of the leaders, for example, in the first century. Augustine stressed the necessity of the primacy of grace, the primacy of the supernatural life, and the primacy of all that is connected with the supernatural life.
Robert Moynihan: This is the point. Actually, yes, they try to get rid of the supernatural because they think it is irrelevant.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: I said to Pope Leo at the beginning of my audience, Holy Father, allow me to make a diagnosis of the current sickness and crisis of the Church. We must go back to the roots. I said this is a Pelagianization of the Church in our day, which means that we place primacy on natural, temporal affairs to the detriment of the supernatural and the eternal. I made this clear to the Holy Father.
Robert Moynihan: Very interesting. You went into a very profound theological discussion in that sense. Now we just had a comment on the screen. Good morning, Dr. Moynihan, Curtis White. I wonder if you might ask Bishop Schneider a question: to what extent should we view the current state of the Church as a cross to bear, and to what extent should we resist?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, we should do both.
Robert Moynihan: Okay.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Because it is a cross, and we must embrace it with supernatural faith, because who is suffering? Christ is suffering. He is the head of His mystical body, and He is spiritually suffering. He cannot suffer more physically because He resurrected, but spiritually and mystically, He suffers in His mystical body, with this unprecedented crisis of the Church. Our Mother Church is suffering.
As children of our Mother, when we observe her suffering, we see her hands tied and humiliated. Our Mother is humiliated, firstly by the high clergy, by cardinals and bishops, who collaborate with her enemies. We must state this very clearly. As children, we suffer with our Mother, but we also, in a spirit of chivalry, say: we will not allow our Mother to be humiliated. We will do what we can, of course, with Christian spirit, with the spirit of the Church, to defend her and to see her honored in some way.
This is a proper form of resistance, not with anger, not with irreverence, but with reverence, with a supernatural spirit, and with clarity. We must not perform mental acrobatics to say, “It’s all okay; we must only interpret.” That is dishonest and against reason.
So, we unite both: we suffer and accept it as a cross, but we also do what we can and resist the abuses of the clergy and hierarchy. This includes forbidding the traditional Latin Mass and other forms of traditional worship, as well as resisting those who proclaim heresies or immoral acts shamelessly in churches and dioceses. We must resist.
Robert Moynihan: What you’ve now reflected on brings us to the final question: the centrality of Christ in history and in our personal lives. He is the Savior. If we set Christ aside, as has been done over recent decades, a secularizing trend emerges that says, “He was a good teacher, but there is no heaven, no eternity, no salvation from sin and death. Life is only the creation of a humanistic world.” This is seen in the United Nations, the communist system, and now also in globalist agendas and AI efforts to create a world without Christ.
I watched a beautiful interview you gave with Matt Gaspers a year ago, just after Pope Leo was elected. You said the centrality of Christ is that He saves us from a dead end, from frustration, from no exit, from this temporal, fallen world. He is the Savior, and therefore we rejoice and have a Church to worship, praise, and glorify Him. He is the only one who saves us. We can be respectful of people in all traditions, but we also have to offer them Christ. You speak about this beautifully, over and over. This is the central question.
Someone, Curtis White, appreciates your brilliant, thoughtful answer. We must keep clear that this battle is eternal, with eternal consequences. You are fighting it very hard. You do not want the Church split. It is a tragedy when some of the most faithful are excommunicated.
What should we think about Cardinal Fernandez’s statement that the text of Vatican II should not be modified at all, as part of the dialogue with the SSPX and the upcoming SSPX consecrations? This is a very difficult issue. What do you think?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: First, the statement of Cardinal Fernandez is completely wrong. What cannot be changed is only the Word of God. You cannot change the Bible because it is the Word of God. Second, you cannot change the dogmas proclaimed ex cathedra. Even though dogmas can be clarified or expressed with more precision by another pope or council, that is possible. Dogmatic formulations are infallible, but they can still be improved for clarity. It is not the Word of God itself, but the formulation can be refined.
Robert Moynihan: Well, there are two questions from the Second Vatican Council. They declared it was a pastoral…
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Exactly, that is what I want to say. Therefore, the Second Vatican Council, convoked by Pope John XXIII, clearly stated that the Council was not convoked to give new dogmas or to define doctrines in a definitive way. These are the words of John XXIII. He said the Council was only convoked to provide explanations in a catechetical style, to teach the people of our time in the style of our time. It was a catechetical, pastoral explanation of doctrines that remain the same.
The modality or form of explanation, which is not a dogma and not a definitive teaching, but a temporal, pastoral, catechetical explanation, is, of course, possible to change, improve, or correct. It was not intended to be stated in a definitive form. Paul VI, one month after the conclusion of the Council, in January 1966, proclaimed in a general audience, I think on January 12th, that the Council did not intend to proclaim a dogma or definitive doctrine. Its character was primarily pastoral. We must restate this.
Therefore, the formulation of Cardinal Fernandez is completely wrong. Of course, he would be correct regarding statements in the Council that quote previous councils’ dogmas, which are unchangeable. But other formulations, which are pastoral in character, can be changed, improved, or corrected.
I would ask Cardinal Fernandez: I made a list of pastoral statements of previous councils that are unacceptable to us. Could they be corrected? He would have to concede, yes. For example, in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, some pastoral expressions could be changed. Why not the pastoral expressions of the Second Vatican Council? For instance, the Fourth Lateran Council stated that Jewish people living in a Christian town must bear a distinctive sign on their clothing. This is horrible discrimination, similar to what Hitler enforced. It also stated that if a Catholic employed Jewish or Muslim servants, that Catholic was excommunicated. I would ask Cardinal Fernandez if this statement of an ecumenical council can be corrected. I assume he would say, of course.
Robert Moynihan: The bottom line of what you are saying is that the SSPX has a point. They argue that certain passages of the Second Vatican Council have been developed into a conciliar teaching that creates a new Church, different from prior centuries. They want to reinterpret those passages within the tradition, keeping the centrality of Christ as the unique Savior, rather than saying all religions are equally pathways to God. The SSPX is right to say that on five or six points, passages from a pastoral Council have been extrapolated into a new paradigm of the Church, which needs correction. They are not wrong.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, I agree with you. I think God permits this issue so that the entire Church may awaken and honestly say, “Stop.” We must examine the evident and undeniable ambiguities in some expressions of the Council. Let us take the most famous examples: religious freedom, ecumenism, and collegiality. We cannot simply say, “It’s all okay,” and perform mental acrobatics to twist it into a satisfactory interpretation. That is dishonest and an offense to reason.
I like this expression from Chesterton: upon entering the Church, we are asked to take off our hats, but we must still be capable of reasoning honestly and saying, “This cannot be reconciled. It is an evident contradiction, or at least dangerously ambiguous.” Such ambiguities must be corrected by the Magisterium because they are pastoral, not definitive, teachings. Pastoral statements, like those in other Ecumenical Councils, can be improved or corrected. There are many examples.
It would be a tragedy if the SSPX were completely divided from the body of the Church. You even described this like the Old Believers who were excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox leadership, yet they had deep faith and charity. They believed in Christ, and we should be willing to open our arms to them as fellow members of the Body of Christ while exploring these questions. Scholars know that at the Council, some phrases were intentionally included to be used later in ways that might develop unorthodox teachings. Paul VI reportedly said, “No, this can be interpreted with complete orthodoxy,” but others were already planning to use it differently. Games were played at the Council.
It is very evident, and documents continue to reveal this. Now, sixty years later, we live in the 21st century, in a very different cultural context. The statements were made in the mid-20th century, in an idealistic and somewhat illusory vision of the time. Now we see the consequences clearly, and we must address them.
I hope the issue with the Society of St. Pius X can be helpful for the entire Church, providing them the possibility, charitably and pastorally, to clarify, improve, and correct ambiguities. This would be a service for all. I appeal to Pope Leo to learn from history, from examples such as Saint Augustine of Hippo, who showed great generosity toward the Donatists, even when they were difficult, making real concessions to fully unite them. Pope Leo must learn this and act similarly.
In Church history, harshness and immobility have often been harmful. Later, the Church always recognized that the Popes could have been more generous or open to compromise. My appeal regarding the Society is to be truly open and generous, giving them the context to feel at least partially integrated into the life of the Church. Full canonical integration will take time. The first step is minimum integration. The Church is wide enough to find solutions. Then doctrinal dialogue can proceed, but not the other way around. Cardinal Fernandez’s proposal to carry out dialogue first, and only then address the consecrations, is unrealistic, harsh, and unpastoral. It is not synodal.
I fear that some of this harsh behavior from the Holy See toward the Society of St. Pius X may be motivated, at least in part, by ideology. Some may fear that a faithful, active, and doctrinally orthodox group of priests, religious, and laity might have greater influence in preserving the true tradition of the Church. Meanwhile, the Holy See shows generosity to the Communist Party of China, allowing them to select bishops, with the Pope having to accept these ordinations. The contrast is striking.
The faithful of the Society, their priests, families, youth, and converts are treated as second-class. Conditions are set so high that they remain outside. This is evident in Cardinal Fernandez’s statement and procedures. I hope the Holy See and the Pope will recognize this error and act pastorally, responsibly, and wisely, helping the Society of St. Pius X and all their faithful to be more fully integrated into the life of the Church. This would be a great contribution for all of us.
Robert Moynihan: Well, that’s beautifully put, and we are at a crossroads, and you’re calling for pastoral care of the deepest and widest character, to include the SSPX and their deep concerns about modernist Rome, but include them and say, we’re going to your part, you’re our brothers in the church, you keep our Catholic faith, we want your contribution, we will even debate with you how to understand religious freedom, etc. And this is obviously something that has been going on, and Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, discussed some of these questions as well. But if they are separated off, like amputating an arm, inevitably, the sectarian feeling will increase, and they will be cut off. Even if they are global, they’ll be cut off from the global church. And the Catholic Church is beautiful because of its universality. If we lose this arm, we’ll be disfigured and will be harmed.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: So I am agreeing with you, and this is the case, and the responsibility for this exclusion, mainly of exemplary Catholics, faithful of the Society of Pius the 10s, and so many exemplary religious sisters and priests, and even the bishops, I assume they are exemplary bishops, I know them. So they will be put on the margin, on the periphery, and as you said, driven to live in a kind of, yes, I would not say sectarian, but a little bit in a ghetto mentality because they are driven away. It is normal, it is psychological, understandable, human, and their responsibility; the guilt will be mainly by the Vatican, not by them. As you see in human life, when a father or a mother is too strict with their children, the children then go away from home because they can’t bear it. Later, they will recognize, oh, why could we have been a little bit more tolerant, maybe not so harsh with our adult children, and many cases could have been avoided. I know later, some fathers, some mothers, regret it, but it is too late because of this alienation. I hope that Pope Leo will act with a true Augustinian wholeness and pastoral wholeness, in a true inclusivity towards them, and show that the church of Rome is mother also for the Society of Pius X.
Robert Moynihan: Very, very beautiful words, Bishop Schneider. I appreciate you. We’re coming to the end of our time together. I wanted to say that the man behind me on the shelf is my uncle, my father’s brother. He was a Franciscan in the 1950s in Bolivia. In some ways, I think he was a little bit like Pope Leo. He was an American, and he was trying to become a missionary. He joined the Order of St Francis, he studied in the old Latin seminary training, he slept in a bed where he was cold in the morning, and they had mass every morning. He went on a donkey. There’s a picture of him on a donkey in the mountains of Bolivia, just like a picture of Pope Leo in the mountains of Peru. He was a man with a wide heart. He cared for people. He knew that we are in a fallen world, there’s a lot of sin, and he was always trying to bring people back to hope, to faith, to love. I loved him dearly. He died almost 40 years ago. He had a heart attack, and he died, but I keep his picture to remember what a good priest can be. And you are a good bishop, positioned there in Kazakhstan, watching these world events now, the wars, the rumors of wars, the coming of AI, the divisions in the church, and you have been marvelous in speaking clearly about doctrine, but always with a type of tenderness as a pastor. You don’t have that quality of bitter condemnation even when you criticize error, so I appreciate you.
We’re going to get together with you for a few days. I have at the bottom of the screen, Dr. Moynihan and Bishop Schneider on a private island off the coast of Croatia for a five-night retreat, June 15 to 21, 2026.
Here’s the island, Bishop Schneider, and in the background, that mountain is in Croatia. You can only get to this island by boat. There’s a Franciscan monastery from about 1390, and they’ve brought the monastery up to date. During the Yugoslav time, they were kicked out, and the government let it fall into disrepair. That is the only building on the island. There’s a little path around the whole island, which takes about 45 minutes to walk around. They have gardens in the back, and there’s the pathway. It’s a place of retreat, and we’re trying to help the Franciscans there continue to keep that monastery going. In that hope, we want to have a number of retreats on the island. You very graciously agreed to give five days of your time, and I’m hoping we can be renewed in spirit, renewed in faith, have a deeper understanding, and rest a little, have a little quiet from this very busy world.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, good, very good.
Robert Moynihan: Alright, Bishop Schneider, it was wonderful to talk about your meeting with Pope Francis, Pope Leo. You also met with Pope Francis, yes, yes. And you always prayed for Pope Francis.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: I still continue to pray for him, for his soul, that he is in Purgatory. I think he needs so much of our help. I feel pity for his soul, and this is true fraternal love. There were saints, proven saints, who implored people, please, pray for my soul when I am dead, don’t canonize me, I will suffer in Purgatory. And this is what the saints said we shall do. So let us pray with much fraternal charity for the soul of the deceased Pope Francis.
Robert Moynihan: This is your profound charity, profound courtesy, your profound Christian love.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: And let us pray for Pope Leo, our Holy Father, the successor of Peter, the Vicar of Christ, that He may be illuminated by God, that He may recognize the reality and extent of the crisis of the church, of doctrine, of liturgy, and give us, with God’s help, a remedy. We will then, all the good children of the church, sons and daughters of the church, all over the world, support him. Already, with our prayers, he needs so much the light of God to see the reality of the crisis and the strength of God to execute it, to do his work. So let us pray.
Robert Moynihan: Let us pray. Thank you very, very much, Bishop Schneider.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: You’re welcome.
Robert Moynihan: Good night in Kazakhstan.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: God bless you.