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Father Paisley: As I said at Mass, it is such an honor to have Bishop Schneider here to be with us. We are the little parish that has a big cathedral heart, I told him, and we are the little place in between the big cities of Washington and New York, so he is in Heartland, New Jersey, here, down here in southern New Jersey. We have many people here from Philadelphia and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, from the city and from the suburbs, who have also come down. And I think there may be a few people from the state of Delaware who have come up. So we welcome all of you here to this wonderful day. Thank you for praying to Our Lady for the weather. She came through wonderfully for us, and it is just a gorgeous day.
But as you know, Bishop Schneider is the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Astana in Kazakhstan. He is of German descent, and his parents were originally in Ukraine and then during the time of the Soviets, they were forced into the gulags in Russia, and eventually ended up in Kazakhstan, or Uzbekistan, as it is now. They eventually were able to move to Estonia, and eventually, the Bishop said, by a miracle, they were able to leave the Soviet Union. That is where he joined the order of the Canon Regulars in Austria, a group based in Portugal, an ancient order. He spent many years teaching in Brazil in the seminary, then came back to Rome, got his doctorate in Rome, and stayed there on their general council. He went back to help in Kazakhstan and was made the auxiliary bishop there, so he has been there ever since. We all know him from his wonderful writings, especially Domino Sest, and his clear love and expression of the truth of our faith and all its traditions. So with great, great honor, I introduce you to Bishop Athanasius Schneider.
Bishop Schneider: Dear Father Paisley, I thank you very much for your kind words of greetings and for your invitation to come here to Berlin and to visit your parish. I am very grateful to the providence of God that I could celebrate today with you this beautiful Mass. I am very touched and moved seeing here the young church. We celebrated the Mass in a manner that was always celebrated, the Mass of all ages. But this is the young church. This is the true springtime of the church.
And so, especially, this is a demonstration when you see, when we see the young people and the children, young clergy. And so this is a sign of hope for us. Let us continue in this way, and God will bless this way. I also wish blessings to Father, your father, the parish priest here, pastor, and to all of you.
I would like to speak today to you about the Social and Universal Kingship of Christ.
Jesus Christ is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. This is the truth of our faith. Jesus Christ, the incarnated God and the Savior of the world, is truly a king. He himself confessed this truth in the face of his salvific death on the cross when He proclaimed before Pilate, that means before the representatives of the pagan and unbelieving world power of those times, Yes, I am a king.
Before He ascended into heaven, Christ solemnly reiterated, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. If it is what constitutes the kingship of Jesus. His kingship is not from this world, as he himself has told us. His origin is in heaven, in God himself. The kingship was given to Jesus directly from God in the moment of his incarnation. At the same moment, Jesus was constituted priest, priest forever.
The kingship of Jesus is a kingship of truth, of peace, of love, of justice. It is the only kingdom that sets human beings really free, which frees man from the various forms of slavery.
The worst form of slavery is the slavery of sin. This slavery is the most cruel and dangerous because it changes man’s reason to error, and it changes man’s will to evil and ultimately to hatred.
Man, fallen in sin, as well as human societies, often chose for themselves, not Christ as their king, but they chose other kings. Human beings and human societies cannot exist without subjection to a king or to a ruler. When man or society rejects subjecting themselves to Christ as their king, they necessarily subject themselves, whether they like it or not, to another king who is not Christ. Man and human society cannot exist and live in a neutral area, in an area without a king or without a ruler.
Oftentimes, men and human societies spoke these rebellious and arrogant words, words instilled ultimately by Satan. “We do not want Christ to be our king”. Renae christumnolumus.
Every human being and every human society has been created for a purpose: to accept Christ as their king. Instead, sinful man and the unbelieving human and political society proclaim, as did the Jewish priests and the Pharisees in front of Pilate, we do not have any other king except Caesar. Every human person and every human and political society should say the contrary. We have no other king except Christ.
During the cruel persecution of Christians in Mexico on the part of the Free Masonic government in the 1920s, and on behalf of the communists in Spain in the 1930s of the same century, thousands of Catholics, among them many children, even adolescents, accepted martyrdom with the cry, Long live Christ the King, Viva Cristo Rey.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us the duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially. I repeat this, not only individually but also socially. This is stated by the Catechism. This is the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and one Church of Christ. This is Vatican Two, Dignitatis Humanae.
By constantly evangelizing men, the Church works toward enabling them to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and moral laws, and so the structures of the communities in which they live. The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken in each man the love for the true and the good. It requires them to make known the worship of the one true religion, which is the Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Christians are called to be the light of the world. Thus, the Church shows forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies. End of quotation, this is the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, very traditional teaching I repeat, the kingship, kingship of Christ in particular, also over human societies. Then a true modern apostle of the social and universal kingship of Christ was Cardinal Louis P, Bishop of Poitiers in France in the second half of the 19th century.
His episcopal magisterium prepared the syllabus of Pope Pius IX and the papal teachings about the social kingship of Christ in the 20th century. There are some powerful witnesses of the popes about this. Cardinal P, Pius the 10th, giving audience in the French seminary, declared to have often read and reread the works of this Cardinal P.
This veneration of Pius the 10th for the great Bishop of Poitiers is demonstrated for us by this account found in a witness of Canon Vigil. He says a priest from Poitiers recalled that one day he had the honor of having been introduced into the cabinet of the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius the Tenth, and Pius the Tenth in the company of a religious who was also from Poitiers, said all these Diocese of Poitiers. The Holy Father exclaimed, raising his hands when you heard the name Poitiers mentioned, I have almost the entire works of your Cardinal. The saintly pontiff continued, and for years there has hardly been a day that I have not read some of its pages, so Pius the Tenth.
The Cardinal P, he himself, one year before his death, upon receiving the cardinalate beret, had spoken to the President of the Republic of France in these terms. I quote him, a most strict obligation is incumbent upon me to employ the remainder of my life, the final fervor of my soul, to inculcate upon our contemporaries the apostolic sentence which the 30 years of my pastoral teaching has not been other than the expression namely, let no person pose upon another outside of the one that has been posed by the hand of God and which is Christ Jesus.
And for the people, as for the individuals, for modern societies as for the ancient societies, for the republics as for the monarchies, there has been no name under heaven given to man in which they can be saved if it is not the name of Jesus Christ.
We can admire the following affirmations of Cardinal P, which reveal the true spirit of the apostles and of the Church of all times, and which are therefore up to date for our time as well.
So he says, Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the entire social edifice. Apart from him, all is shaken, all is divided, all is lost. Place, therefore, in the heart of your contemporaries, in the heart of our public man, this profound conviction that they cannot do anything for the security of the country and of her liberties so long as they do not hold Christ as the basic cornerstone which has been laid by the divine hand. Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our country, the recapitulation of our country, the summary of our history. Jesus Christ is our entire future.
Then he continues, Calm yourselves, the doctrine of the syllabus and of the Vatican Council, the First Vatican Council, is as ancient as the doctrines of the apostles. It is not a new doctrine, syllabus, and they are as ancient as the doctrine of the scriptures.
For example, to those who obstinately refused recognition to the social authority of Christianity, look at the response given by Pope St Gregory the Great. He is commenting on the chapter of the Gospels where the adoration of the Magi is related, explaining the mystery of the gifts offered to Jesus by the representatives of the pagans.
The holy doctor of the Church, Gregory the Great, expresses himself in these terms. The Magi recognize in Jesus the triple quality of God, of man, and of King. They offer gold to the king, incense to the God, and myrrh to the man. Well, so the pope continues, there are some heretics who believe that Jesus is God and who believe equally that Jesus is man, but who absolutely refuse to believe that his reign as King extends everywhere. So they only accept Him as God, as man, but not as a ruler in every society, in all human realities.
You say, brother, that you have a peaceful conscience accepting, as you do, the program of liberal Catholicism, since you intend to remain orthodox, counting on it that you believe firmly in the divinity and humanity of Christ. This is enough for an unassailable Christianity. Stop deceiving yourself. From the time of St Gregory the Great, there were certain heretics who believed these two points with you, only the divinity of Christ and the humanity of Christ, and not that he is a king, his kingship, his influence in society also. And so he continues, Cardinal P says their heresy consisted in not wanting to recognize at all that God made man has also a kingship that extends everywhere and to all.
No, you are not irreproachable in your faith, and Pope St Gregory, more energetic than the syllabus, inflicts on you the note of heresy. If you are among those who, making it their duty to offer incense to Jesus, do not wish at all to add the gold for Jesus.
Cardinal P also said, the dethronement of God on earth is a crime to which we must never become resigned. Let us never cease to protest against it.
Note the last words addressed by our Lord to His apostles before He ascended into heaven: All power is given to me in heaven and on earth. Therefore, teach ye all nations. You notice that our Lord Jesus Christ does not say all men, Go teach all men, or all individuals, or all families, but go teach all nations. He does not merely say, baptize children, teach the Catechism, bless marriages, administer the sacraments, give religious burial to the dead.
Of course, the mission He confers on the apostles comprises all that, but it comprises more than that, for it has a public and a social character. Jesus Christ is King of peoples and nations. Go teach all nations.
Explaining the Lord’s Prayer, Cardinal P illustrates the doctrine of the social kingship of Christ with these words: Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. He insisted that all these demand the public, social reign of God through the acknowledgement of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom the Father has sent.
The name of God is not hallowed as it should be if it is not hallowed publicly and socially. Our Lord’s kingdom is meant to come not only in individual souls and in heaven, but on earth, throughout the submission of states and nations to His rule.
The will of God is not done on earth as it is in heaven if organized societies here below do not acknowledge their duties to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Catholic Cardinal P goes on to say, God is not a being who shuts Himself up in an oratory from which the tumult of the world is carefully excluded, and who, occupied exclusively with saving His own soul, takes no interest in the way the world is going.
When our Lord taught His apostles the Our Father, He made it clear that none of His followers could accomplish the first act of religion, which is prayer, without putting himself in relation with all that can advance or retard, favor or hinder the reign of God on earth, and he must do this in proportion to his intellectual attainments and to the extent of the horizon open before him.
As long as this world lasts, let us never consent to limit the reign of God to heaven only or even to heaven and the interior souls. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
The dethronement of God on earth is a crime to which we must never become resigned. Let us never cease to protest against it.
And Cardinal P writes more, stating, Here we have the kernel of the question. Let us not forget nor allow people to forget what the great apostle teaches, that Jesus Christ, after ascending into heaven, went there in order to fill all things with impleit omnia. It is not a question of His presence as God, because this presence always was, but it concerns His presence as God man at the same time.
In fact, Jesus Christ is from now on present to all things on earth as well as in heaven. He fills the world with His name, with His law, with His light, with His grace. Nothing is placed outside. Nothing is placed outside of His fear, attraction, or of repulse, or propulsion.
Nothing and no person can remain totally indifferent to Christ or estranged from Him. One is for Him or against Him. He is placed as the cornerstone, a construction stone for these, a stumbling stone for those, a touchstone for all.
The history of humanity, the history of the nations, the history of peace and of war, above all, the history of the church, is the history of Jesus filling all things. Neither in His person nor in carrying out His rights can Jesus Christ be divided, dissolved, or splintered.
In Him, the distinction between nature and operations can never be a separation or opposition. The divine cannot be hostile to the human, nor the human to the divine. On the contrary, He is peace coming together, reconciliation. He is like the hyphen on the written page, the factor that makes two things one.
That is why St John tells us, every spirit that denies Jesus Christ is not of God and belongs to Him who is the antichrist, of whom you have heard that He is coming and is already in the world.
I hear certain noises get louder and louder. I hear certain sayings become more common day after day. Something is introduced that threatens the world, and it is introduced into the heart of societies. I am sure it must dissolve that heart. So I cry out, be on your guard against the antichrist.
Cardinal P’s teaching is a true reflection of the teaching of the apostles and of the constant teaching of the doctors of the church. We find the same teaching expressed in the encyclicals and magisterial pronouncements of a great number of Popes. Pope Leo the 13th states in his encyclical Libertas, issued in the year 1888, he states, wherefore civil society must acknowledge God as its founder and parent and must obey in reverence His power and authority.
Justice, therefore, forbids, and reason itself forbids the state to be godless. It’s very important, I repeat this statement, justice and reason itself forbid that the state be godless, atheistic, or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness, namely, to treat the various religions as they call them alike and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.
He wrote this in the 19th century for the Catholic nations. We have to observe this, where in those times it was against, in Catholic countries, to put the Catholic religion on the same level as a sect, for example.
And against this, Pope Leo the 13th protested in this encyclical, which I quote to you now. Since then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the state. That religion must be professed which alone is true and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic states, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraved upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the state must preserve and protect the true religion if they are to provide.
Do as they should do with prudence and usefulness for the good of the community.
For public authority exists for the welfare of those whom it governs and although its proximate end is to lead men to the prosperity found in this life, yet in so doing it ought not to diminish but rather to increase man’s capability of attaining to the supreme good in which his everlasting happiness consists, which never can be attained if religion be disregarded in civil society. So the words of Pope Leo the 13th in his first encyclical in 1939.
Pope Pius the 12th transmitted the same ever Catholic doctrine about the social and universal kingdom of Christ. He says, What heart is not inflamed, is not swept forward to help at a sight of so many brothers and sisters who are misled by error, passion, temptation, prejudice, have strayed away from faith in the true God and have lost contact with the joyful and life-giving message of Christ.
Who among the soldiers of Christ, ecclesiastical or layman, does not feel himself incited and spurred on to a greater vigilance, to a more determined resistance by the sight of the ever increasing hosts of Christ’s enemies as he perceives the spokesmen of these tendencies deny or in practice neglect the vilifying truth and the values inherent in belief in God and in Christ as he perceives them.
They break the tables of God’s commandments to substitute other tables and other standards stripped of the ethical content of the revelation. Standards in which the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Cross has no place anymore in society.
It is very up-to-date. Pope Pius 12 says in 1939 that society breaks the tables of the ten commandments of God and substitutes these ten commandments with others, and societies in which the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and the Cross has no more place.
The same Pope continues, the Holy Gospel narrates that when Jesus was crucified, there was darkness over the whole earth, a terrifying symbol of what happened and what still happens spiritually wherever incredulity, blind and proud of itself, has succeeded in excluding Christ from modern life, especially from public life, and has undermined faith in God as well as faith in Christ.
The consequence is that the moral values by which, in other times, public and private conduct was guided have fallen into disuse.
And the much wanted civilization of society, which has made ever more rapid progress withdrawing man, the family and the state from the beneficent and regenerating effects of the idea of God and of the teaching of the Church, has caused to reappear in regions in which for many centuries shone the splendors of Christian civilization, in a manner ever clearer, ever more distinct, ever more distressing, the signs of a corrupt and corrupting paganism.
There was darkness when they crucified Jesus. They did not perceive the inability of all human effort to replace the law of Christ by anything equal to it. They became vain in their thoughts. So, Pius, when in our days individuals and entire societies reject the unveiled fire, Christ as King, we are called to confess Him and offer Him expiation and reparation.
When in our days the truth of Christ is denied and perverted into its opposite, even on behalf of some clerics inside the Church, we are called to confess courageously the unchanging, divine, and liberating truth of Christ.
Already in 1888, Pope Leo the 13th left us this lucid and valid teaching. I quote him: It is quite unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, of writing, or of worship as if these were so many rights given by nature to man, for if nature had really granted them, it would be lawful to refuse obedience to God, and there would be no restraint in human liberty.
So Pope Leo the 13th: We are living in a time where the commandments of God are denied in theory and in practice and without blessing, perverted into their opposite. We are talking here, for example, about the first commandment. The first commandment says: “You shall have no other gods besides Me,” Me, who am God, the Most Holy Trinity.
This is the only one and true God, the Holy Trinity. When there is no worship of the Most Holy Trinity, and concretely when there is no worship of Christ, the King of kings, there is no true worship of God at all.
There is no salvation, because all other forms of worship do not correspond to the will of God, except the worship of the Most Holy Trinity. They don’t correspond to the will of God or to the first commandment.
The first commandment does not even admit the slightest ambiguity or vagueness. A Catholic can acknowledge only the cult of the Most Holy Trinity and of Christ, the incarnate God and King. Therefore, a Catholic cannot participate even indirectly in any other religious cult which is not the cult of the Most Holy Trinity. A Catholic cannot burn even the smallest grain of incense before the images of new idols, as, for example, before the idol of a standard religion, before the idol of public opinion, or before the idol of political correctness.
Pius XII stated that many noble minds are recognizing in the Catholic Church principles of belief and life that have stood the test of 2,000 years; the strong cohesion of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which, in union with the successor of Peter, spends itself in enlightening minds with the teaching of the Gospel, in guiding and sanctifying man, and which is generous in its material condescension towards all but firm when, even at the cost of torments or martyrdom, the Magisterium, the bishops, and the Pope have to say: “Non licet” it is not allowed to do this.
So, Pius XII, these words remain ever valid and up to date. They are a pure mirror of the words of the apostles and the Fathers of the Church.
So the Pope continues, the same Pope, saying: In the recognition of the royal prerogative of Christ, and in the return of individuals and societies to the law, the truth of Christ and to His love lies the only way to salvation, following the sublime teaching of Christ, summed up by Himself in the twofold precept of love of God and of neighbor.
Millions of souls have reached, are reaching, and shall reach peace. History, wisely called by a great Roman the teacher of life, has proved for close on 2,000 years how true is the word of Scripture: “He will not have peace who resists God.” He will not have peace who resists God. For Christ alone is the cornerstone on which man and society can find stability in salvation. On this cornerstone the Church is built, and hence against her the adversary can never prevail. The gates of hell shall not prevail, nor can they ever weaken her. Rather, internal and external struggles tend to augment the false and multiply the laurels of her glorious victories of the Church. The Catholic Church is the city of God.
The Catholic Church is the city whose King is Truth, whose law is Love, and whose measure is Eternity. St. Augustine said this: Our measure in the Church is Eternity, not temporal welfare.
And so, may all Catholics in our days, beginning with the Pope, until the most humble and weak member of the Church, strive vigorously in their words, deeds, prayers, and sufferings for the installation of the social and universal kingship of Christ.
Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.
Thank you for your attention.