Although Querida Amazonia’s stance on priestly celibacy comes as a relief, the document contains ‘lamentable doctrinal ambiguities and errors,’ Bishop Schneider writes in exclusive in-depth analysis
By Diane Montagna, LifeSiteNews, February 19, 2020
In a new in-depth analysis of the apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia, Bishop Athanasius Schneider has praised what he views as Pope Francis’ decision not to weaken priestly celibacy or open the door to a female “diaconate.” But he has also criticized the “lamentable doctrinal ambiguities and errors” that he says the document contains.
The auxiliary bishop of St. Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, maintains that Querida Amazonia’s stance on priestly celibacy and female “deacons” represents “a glimmer of hope amid the ongoing confusion,” despite the document’s “theological limitations and errors.”
Bishop Schneider begins his analysis (see full text below) by describing the “spiritual earthquake” that Querida Amazonia caused among the “anti-Christian mainstream media” and “powerful networks” of prelates and lay bureaucrats (particularly in the German-speaking world) who were banking on real change in the Church.
He asserts that the reactions from these “secularized and protestantizing networks” reveals not only their confidence that priestly celibacy would be abolished, and female “ordination” approved, but also that they were using the Amazon people “as a means to ruthlessly achieve their political ecclesiastical goals.”
Likening such reactions to the tumult surrounding Paul VI’s promulgation of the 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, Bishop Schneider said he believes that Pope Francis’ “stance regarding the law of priestly celibacy and female ordination” ought to come “as a relief to all true Catholics.”
“The rock of Peter, which over the course of the current pontificate has been almost continuously enshrouded in mist, has become at least for a time a rock in the surf, resisting the pressure of the crashing waves, and has been illumined by a ray of the divine promise of Christ,” he writes.
Bishop Schneider says he believes this ray would become a “radiant light” were Pope Francis to proclaim ex cathedra that “the Sacrament of Holy Orders, in its three grades of diaconate, presbyterate and episcopate, is by divine institution reserved to the male sex.”
In his analysis of the apostolic exhortation, the bishop maintains that one must “in fairness” also highlight that “Querida Amazonia as a whole represents an improvement compared to the Final Document of the Amazon Synod,” and he cites several examples.
But Bishop Schneider makes clear that “in noting the improvements made in Querida Amazonia, one cannot be silent about the lamentable doctrinal ambiguities and errors it contains, as well as its dangerous ideological tendencies.”
He specifically identifies as “highly problematic” Querida Amazonia’s “implicit endorsement of a pantheistic and pagan spirituality,” its assertion that Christians may “take up an indigenous symbol in some way, without necessarily considering it as idolatry” (n. 79), and its designation of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the “mother of all creatures” (n. 111).
He also identifies, as one of the document’s “main erroneous tendencies,” the “promotion of naturalism,” and what he calls “slight echoes of pantheism and a hidden Pelagianism.”
“Such tendencies may be detected in the excessive emphasis and value [Querida Amazonia] places on care for natural, earthly and temporal realities” and “weaken considerably” the Church’s mandate to preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all nations (cf. Lk 24:47).
Bishop Schneider observes: “Jesus Christ did not say: ‘God gave his only Son, that this planet and its many parts like the Amazon biome should not perish but have abundant natural life.’ Nor did Jesus say: ‘Go and proclaim that the kingdom of Mother Earth is close at hand.’”
“The material creation suffers precisely because of the lack of the supernatural life of Christ’s grace in the souls of men,” he insists.
Calling on the “little ones” in the Church to pray that the “glimmer of hope” offered in Querida Amazonia’s silence on married priests may “develop into a radiant light,” Bishop Schneider recalls the Lord’s words to his Vicar on Earth, through the fourteenth century mystic, St. Bridget of Sweden: “Start to reform the church that I purchased with my own blood in order that it may be reformed and led back spiritually to its pristine state of holiness” (Book of Revelations).
“The current Roman Curia is passing through a great crisis because of a new excessive involvement in temporal and earthly affairs, to such an extent that the Holy See has become … a kind of daughter-house of the United Nations,” Bishop Schneider writes. “The Lord will surely intervene and purify Rome and the papacy, as he did so many times in the past.”
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