Transcript:
Brian McCall: Welcome to another special report from Catholic Family News. This time, we are honored to welcome back to our program Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who is going to be speaking to us from his home diocese in Kazakhstan. Our topic this evening is going to center around a book he recently published by Sophia Institute Press, entitled Flee From Heresy: A Catholic Guide to Ancient and Modern Errors. So welcome back, Your Excellency. I hope you’re doing well.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Thank you.
Brian McCall: And I’d like to start off by asking you why you wrote a book about heresy at this particular time. Why do you think a book like this is needed at this time in history?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: It is so evident, and even a blind person can perceive it, that we are living in a time with an enormous doctrinal confusion and systematic spreading of errors in the life of the church and heresies. Therefore, it seemed to me important and necessary to address this topic.
Brian McCall: And you begin the book, which I think is always good, by talking about the word itself and some definitions. You talk about a broader and a more narrow meaning of heresy. That’s important because many times in public discourse today, you hear the word used just to mean errors plain and simple, like, “that person is wrong, that’s a heresy.” Maybe you could help us understand the difference between just making a mistake, or having an error in detail, and a heresy in a strict sense.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Well, the Church herself gives us the clear meaning and definition of heresy in the Code of Canon Law. So, heresy, according to the definition of the Code of Canon Law, means a conscious, intentional, and obstinate denial of revealed divine truth which the church proclaimed or proposed as such, as a divine truth to be believed with divine faith, or a denial or doubting. The key aspect here is obstinacy. This is the correct meaning. And why is it so precise? Because it is a crime, not only a sin, but a crime according to the canon law, and must be punished. It is punished with excommunication, which is the heaviest punishment of the church. Therefore, one must be careful in applying this concept, this term.
Brian McCall: In that definition, I think you point to and the church underscores the subjective element of the crime, as distinct from the objective nature of a statement. So if we take the statement, “Christ has three natures,” we could say that’s objectively a heretical proposition. It’s not what the Church teaches. But what more does one have to show that a person who says those words is actually committing the crime and even the sin of heresy on the subjective level?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, it is obstination. It presupposes that this person had been admonished, and then a reaction against that admonishment. When this person nevertheless continues to affirm or to spread such statements, this becomes a sign of obstinacy.
Brian McCall: So in a certain sense, I think that should be consoling for people of our time, because we live in a time, and you’ve written about this in another place, where there’s not very much catechesis, where many times people are not taught the exact truths. And so I think it’s reassuring that people should understand they can’t, by accident, commit the crime of heresy just because they didn’t know something they should have known. It’s that they need to have been corrected and say, “Well, I’m not going to change what I first thought was correct based on the church.” Would you agree with that?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, of course, I’m agreeing with this. So we have to be precise when we speak of heresy, or when you are accused of heresy. I repeat, because it is, according to the church discipline, connected with a punishment of excommunication.
Brian McCall: I think it’s an interesting topic, because we live in very unusual times when almost any day you can do a search on the internet and find someone accusing one of your fellow bishops, or sadly, the Holy Father, of “Oh, they’ve committed heresy,” but without really thinking through it. They just want to throw the accusation out quickly. So I guess the first point with that is, whose place is it to judge the crime that someone has actually committed heresy?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Well, ultimately, it is the Church’s Magisterium. The church must declare excommunication when this person is guilty of the crime of heresy, and this is the task of the church authority. When the church authority does not act, any well-instructed person is able to state that, for example, this expression is a heresy. Even a well-instructed person in catechesis, when someone says that Jesus Christ is not really present in the mystery of the Eucharist, this is a plain heresy, and everyone who has at least a fundamental catechetical teaching can understand this and state this.
Brian McCall: And throughout your book, which is available from Sophia Press, we will have a link in this video to where you can purchase Flee From Heresy. You do a history, you go through both a chronological and a topical survey of the various heresies the church has encountered through her mission in history. But I’d like to talk about two of them in the next few minutes. The first is really not one heresy, but many, but I put them under the umbrella of the Protestant heresy. And again, there are really many, but what do you think of the fact that in the past several decades, since the 1960s, you often don’t hear that word used with Lutheranism, Anglicanism, or any of the different Protestant sects? They’re often referred to as “separated brethren” or “other Christians.” But it is often hard to find bishops and other members of the hierarchy referring to them as actual heresies. Why do you think that is, and do you think that’s a problem?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, we have the statements of the Council of Trent, the solemn definitions, dogmatic definitions, where many formal heresies of Martin Luther and the other so-called Protestant reformers, whom I would call deformers, as well as the Anglican Church, which basically adapted Calvinism, were condemned, at least the errors heresy of them, and we have to be conscious of these, that Protestantism and Anglicanism contain in their theology, in their official teaching, serious heresies.
Brian McCall: How would you respond to someone who says, “Okay, but there are some parts of the faith that those Protestant sects still teach, and so there’s good in there. Why are you focusing on the heresy or the error that’s in there?”
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: It is because a heresy or an error is in itself something evil. It is harmful. It is a kind of spiritual poison, because it is a contradiction to God’s truth. So it is a rebellious contradiction to what God revealed. God spoke, and you say, “No, this is not true.” So it is a kind of even revolt against the word which God spoke and revealed to us all. The divinely revealed truths are the Word of God, which he addressed to us. The eternal truth, Christ himself, is the truth in person, “I am the truth.” And so when people consciously reject or distort the truth, this is a revolt, a disobedience against God in a grave matter. And then to spread this heresy, which is a contradiction to God, which is a deformation of God’s word, this is harm. This is spiritual poison.
So, when you have, let us say, a cake, a beautiful cake, and there are maybe two small drops of a substance which is harmful for your health, evidently harmful for your health, and you say, “No, I will not eat this cake.” And people say, “Why? There are so many other parts, good, and they are beautifully decorated. Please just accept this.” You say, “I will not accept such a cake.” I will say, “No, they have to first purify these places from these spots, or drops of harmful substance or poison, and then we can continue, then we can use it as a good.”
Brian McCall: The second heresy I’d like to talk to you about is, again, like Protestantism, not one, but a collection of heresies. And that is Modernism, which Saint Pius the Tenth, as you write, called the synthesis of all heresies. And I don’t know if you recall, about 10 years ago, a cardinal, Oscar Rodriguez, who was fairly close to the Holy Father, gave a speech here in the United States where he said that modernism had been condemned, but the church reconciled to modernism, in his interpretation, at Vatican II. My question to you is, is that thesis possible? Can the church ever reconcile to a heresy like Modernism?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: This is not possible, because Modernism is truly a synthesis of all heresies, because the foundation of Modernism is relativism, and this is the most dangerous. It is a destroyer of truth itself, any foundations. And Modernism basically promotes relativism, philosophical, doctrinal, and moral relativism. It means that there is no constant and perennially valid truth. So every historical period establishes its own truth according to the historical development of humanity or a subject. Therefore, according to the relativist theory, what was held as true, maybe in the past, can in our time be the contrary and be for us the truth. So this is so dangerous, and it is really the destroyer of any notion of truth itself.
But in this attitude of relativism is contained the other dangerous tendency, which states that a human being establishes what is true and what is not true, or in a historical period, human beings, what is good and what is evil. So it is, they usurped the divine right to establish and to create truth and good, and therefore, Modernism is so dangerous with this basic attitude of relativism.
Brian McCall: And I think dangerous in another sense, as Saint Pope Pius the Tenth said, as well as Pope Pius the Twelfth, the modernist is very difficult to pin down or to get condemned for heresy, because their use of words is often changing. So, for example, they might affirm a statement of the church, “outside the church, there’s no salvation,” for example, but then interpret that in a way, or apply a meaning to the formula where that is not orthodox. So what is our obligation with respect to the definitions the Church has given? Is it just to repeat the words, or can those same words take on different meanings, as some modernists try to claim?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: The church follows this principle, which was formulated already in the time of the Fathers of the Church, specifically by Saint Vincent of Lerins, that the same dogma and truth must be interpreted always in the same meaning, in the same sense that all the time had. So this is important. It can be, the understanding of the dogma can be deepened, but always in the same sense, in the same meaning. And when an understanding or an interpretation starts to undermine the truth, or to contradict it even slightly, or to put it in an ambiguous interpretation, then it is not a correct understanding, it’s not a deepening, it’s not a true increase of knowledge of faith, but a contrary and truly.
Brian McCall: So, with that, maybe we can take an example that you write about and have written about before, and that is if someone is living a lifestyle of mortal sin. So, for example, living and engaging in acts as if husband and wife with someone to whom they are not legally married. Can they go to receive the sacraments, confession, absolution, and the blessed Eucharist without resolving to leave that situation?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Of course, not. This was constantly taught by the church. It is a contradiction; they contradict themselves, and they contradict the constant practice and teaching of the Church, and it would be a public lie, simply.
Or a public outrage of the Blessed Sacrament, a desecration, because they say, “We believe, let us say, in the indissolubility of the marriage,” even bishops say that, “Yes, the dogma of faith remains that marriage is indissoluble,” but in practice, “we can adapt another way.” In this case, those who live in an unlawful union, and as husband and wife, are committing a grave sin and giving a public scandal, contradicting the will of God in a very important issue, the Sixth Commandment, which is not ecclesiastical law. It is a law of God.
And receiving Holy Communion, they harm their souls, because Saint Paul says, this is a divine teaching because it’s holy scripture, that if someone eats and drinks unworthily, in this case, in a state of sin, he eats and drinks his own, her own judgment, condemnation. It is serious, and so these people are committing an even more grievous sin, not only living in sin against the will of God, regarding the Sixth Commandment, but also desecrating the Most Holy Sacrament, which God established in the church, the Holy Eucharist. So this is a more grievous sin; they accumulate these sins and put ever more the salvation of their souls in danger. And so churchmen who allow such communions are cruel, really cruel. And this is the contrary of love for neighbor. This is a false, fake love for neighbor. They are like a doctor, a physician, who will give, deliver to the patients some poison, maybe decorated with something beautiful, or even when he gives not a poison, but something good, objectively, but which is harmful for the health of these concrete persons. So when someone is suffering from diabetes, he cannot eat sugar and so on, and the doctor will prescribe them and say, “You can, you can surely eat this,” and he will be responsible, he will be responsible for even the death of this person. And this is the same, even more responsible, and worse, in the case of the soul than of the body.
Brian McCall: Well, in that respect of needing medicine, the very first time I saw your name, this was many, many years ago, I think it was even in the pontificate of Benedict the Sixteenth. I remember you called for a new syllabus of errors to condemn, sort of the errors that have grown up since the time of the Second Vatican Council. Do you still think that that’s a remedy that the church needs at this time? And do you have any hope that that might happen in our time?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, of course, because we are living in such a confused time. When in the life of the church so many errors, so many spiritual diseases are being spread, and then you are a responsible physician, and you are observing the spread of diseases and various diseases. It is your obligation to warn people or to make a list and say, “Please, attention. These phenomena are harmful to your health,” and this is the same. The church makes a list, Syllabus means a syllabus, of spiritual, harmful, and dangerous diseases, which are the errors and heresies.
And therefore, it would be a great expression of charity towards the souls when the Church authorities would establish and publish such a syllabus of errors. And it could be done, maybe practically, in a new formula of profession of faith, which is a detailed list of the common, most common errors of our time, enumerating them and saying why they are harmful, contradicting the church teaching. And everyone who will, let us say, become Catholic, or be ordained, or have an office in the church, must then make this detailed profession of faith where the main heresies would be enumerated,
Brian McCall: Like the oath against modernism, for example. So we’ve been speaking about Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s book, Flee From Heresy. You can purchase it from this direct affiliate link. As our viewers may know, Catholic Family News has a cooperative affiliate program with Sophia Institute Press, so a portion of your proceeds will go to support videos like this. This will also be in the description. Before we go, Your Excellency, I’d like to ask you about a timely topic that many of our readers have been concerned with and have been struck with confusion, because, as we’ve been talking about, there are sadly, many theologians, priests, and even, sadly, bishops in the church who are promoting heresy, promoting immoral behavior.
In light of that, many of them seem not to be judged by the church, but in early July, a judgment did come from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, declaring an excommunication latae sententiae against Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. I would like to get your opinion on that. First, I would like to ask you to explain to our readers what your reading of the decree is. Some people have claimed Archbishop Viganò was punished for heresy. First, could you clear up if that actually what was said, and is that true?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: My understanding is that he was formally punished for the crime of schism, not of heresy. I lament that so many bishops and clergy who are openly spreading heresies are not punished. This is unjust; this is a double measure. In some aspects, heresy is more dangerous than schism. Schism is traditionally defined as being against charity and unity, whereas heresy is deeper; it undermines the foundations of our faith itself, so it is more dangerous. I lament that the strictness of the Holy See with which it reacted against schismatic statements of Archbishop Viganò should be applied more to concrete heretical clergymen in the church this is lament.
Brian McCall: Beyond that, more specifically, and maybe you haven’t looked at it enough, but if you had, do you think this judgment of schism is just against Archbishop Viganò, or do you think it is not just?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: I also lament, I regret that Archbishop Viganò is basically promoting Sedevacantism because he does not recognize the validity and authority of the reigning pontiff, whom the entire church, this is important, the entire church, the entire episcopacy, the entire college of cardinals since his election, recognized and is recognizing as the valid Pope. This was the constant and more sure tradition of the church. We have had in the history of the church several cases of evidently invalid papal elections. It would be very good to study the history of the papacy carefully, and there were, but subsequently, the peaceful or the de facto acceptance of an invalidly elected pope by the majority of the episcopate and the faithful made this pope de facto a valid pope. The church, the Holy See, recognized these popes as valid in the list in the Annuario Pontificio. There are many cases when you research history that were evidently invalid in the election mode. It is not a divine law. What is not divine law does not have an absolute validity and absolute value. This is the error of Archbishop Viganò. He establishes a human law, which is the law of the election of a pope, and he absolutizes it. This is not according to the constant and perennial meaning, tradition, and practice of the Catholic Church, of the Holy See.
Also, the issue of a heretical Pope is still a theory of theologians, even saint theologians. It is not an official teaching of the Magisterium. We have to distinguish this, and then, to quote only one Pope, Paul the Fourth, with his bull about a heretical Pope, it is not sufficient because it was not an ex cathedra definition. The church never recognized this bull as an infallible teaching. No Pope and his successors did not continue and did not repeat in their public statements, bulls, and constitutions what Paul the Fourth established, and therefore, the contrary. The old Canon Law, for example, the Corpus Juris Canonici, was a collection of canon law until 1917, and there was contained an expression of the 12th century that the Pope cannot be judged by anyone, unless he deviates from the faith; in this sense, he would be a heretic. But the Magisterium of the church did not teach it.
The Popes did not teach it in their documents, with the exception of only one Pope in the 16th century, so this is not sufficient. One pope is not sufficient; it must be a perennial, a constant teaching of the church. On the contrary, the Code of Canon Law of 1917, which was called the code of Pius and Benedict, removed this phrase from the old Corpus Juris Canonici. If it were the sense of the church to continue with this and what Paul the fourth said, they would not have removed this phrase from the canon law, but it was removed in 1917 and not repeated. This is simply a fact we have to consider to be truly the Catholic meaning, and the sensus fidelium of the church, which I repeat, must be perennial, constantly through the centuries, maintained and repeated not by theologians only, but by the Magisterium of the church. Until now, it is a theory or opinion of theologians, but not an official teaching of the church.
Brian McCall: I do not know if you would agree, but it has been my opinion for some time that one of the dangers of a Sedevacantist position is the danger of curiosity. You want to know everything. Is this theory correct? What would happen if this Pope did this? Instead of understanding there may be some facts or things about the temporal life of the church that we may not know in this lifetime and that are left up to God, and that we do not really need to worry too much about these things because the church has given us the principles to live upon, the truths, and whatever is happening at the highest level of the church, we can proceed to save our souls. Do you think that opinion is a good one and a way to think about this matter, or would you correct something in that?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Yes, I think that one of the basic errors of Sedevacantists is that they infallibilize the Pope. The Pope is not infallible 24 hours a day. This is not Catholic; this is a distortion of the Catholic dogma of infallibility. The infallibility is very precisely defined, and there are conditions for an expression to be infallible. The church says in canon law that a doctrine is not infallible unless it is clearly manifested as such. They cannot simply say that what the Pope speaks or writes in his documents is infallible. They must be carefully examined. The people who promote Sedevacantism commit this basic error of a total or absolute infallibility of the papal Magisterium. Therefore, when they state an error, an ambiguity, or a material heresy of a Pope or after a Council, they draw the wrong consequence of saying that there is no Magisterium and there is no Pope.
The other thing you mentioned is a lack of trust and supernatural vision of the indestructibility of the church. Despite evident errors spread even by a Pope, God is still guiding his church, and God is holding the church in his hands. This phenomenon of doctrinal confusion spread by even a Pope is only temporal. It is temporal; we have to wait, and God will intervene as he did in the past. Simply study the history of the church, and he will intervene. It is his church. These Sedevacantist attitudes are also a kind of human solution. We will take the situation into our hands, and we will resolve it. We will simply declare the Pope is not Pope, or we will elect a new pope, or we will establish a committee, or a kind of imperfect council, or other expressions they invent. This is all a human solution to an issue that can basically and ultimately only be resolved by God himself, as Christ manifested it at the time, during the storm on the sea, where the disciples were with him on the boat. A huge storm started, and the waters came into the boat, and they were incapable of resolving the situation. Only the Lord, who was sleeping, stood up and commanded the wind and storm to be silent. The Lord will do this in our time.
These Sedevacantists lack the basic supernatural trust that the Lord will intervene. This is not promoting passivity, some say, “Oh, you are simply passive and do nothing.” We do, we can, and must, in such cases, admonish the Pope, advise him respectfully, not with disrespectful language, which unfortunately, Archbishop Viganò is sometimes using. We must respectfully admonish him to help him and to spread the true faith. This is an activity. We must pray for the Pope, do penance for the Pope, and do expiation for him and reparation. This is very much active; it is not passive. But leave to the Lord his task. It is not your task to depose the Pope and to declare him not Pope. It is the Lord who will do this through his church after this pontificate. It is better that we must implore with fervent prayers that the Pope, before he dies, will have the grace, the immense grace of God, to retract all his ambiguities and all he did which was contributing to confusion.
Brian McCall: Very, very well said. Thank you. We highly recommend you consider Flee from Heresy, which you can obtain from Sophia Institute Press. We will have a link in the description. Thank you for getting up so early in the morning, your time, Your Excellency, to join us. We will continue to pray for you and your work in the church.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Thank you, God bless you.
Brian McCall: Thank you, Your Excellency.