Transcript:
Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s Speech on His Faith and Vocation
I am very grateful to God that I was born into a true Catholic family. I consider this the greatest gift God can give a person to grow up in a Catholic home. I received the Catholic faith, so to speak, with my mother’s milk. This is an unspeakable grace, which I consider even greater than the priesthood or the episcopate.
My mother, when she was a young girl during the Second World War in Germany, wanted to become a religious sister. She was only thirteen years old and often visited a convent in East Germany to attend Mass. She told the sisters, “When I grow up, I will enter your convent.” But after the war, the Soviet Army deported them to the Ural Mountains for forced labor. Of course, she could not become a nun; the convents were destroyed, and the sisters imprisoned.
Instead, she prayed that God would grant her a good husband and would choose him for her. God answered her prayer when she met my father, Joseph. They married without a priest, in the presence of witnesses, with prayers celebrating the Sacrament of Matrimony in the Ural Mountains.
I grew up in a profoundly Catholic family. My grandparents on both sides were devout Catholics, as were their parents before them. This shows how important it is to have a good Catholic family, one that prepares the soil for vocations to grow through the generations.
Another great grace in my life was growing up in the persecuted Church of the Soviet Union during communist times. Living in a clandestine Church brings special graces that mark you for life. This experience laid the foundation for my Christian life.
We also lived the “domestic church,” the Catholic family, as called by the Second Vatican Council. For years, we had no priests, but my mother, who was our catechist, taught us the faith. On Sundays without a priest, we gathered as a family to sanctify the day with prayers. We even made spiritual communions. This gave us great strength.
My mother always told my father, “We must seek God first in our lives, and the rest will be given to us.” This was our experience. Though we lived modestly under communism, God always provided. My parents cared for us deeply, educating us in prayer, modesty, and mercy.
Another great grace was meeting holy priests who left a deep impression on me. One was Blessed Alexis Zaritsky, a martyr priest who died in Kazakhstan. My mother once saved him from persecution by hiding him. He came to our family several times and blessed me when I was just a year old. I consider his blessing foundational to my vocation.
Later, when we moved to Estonia, I was about nine or ten. We had the privilege of attending a beautiful old church about seventy miles from our town. There, a holy priest, Father Ioannis Pavlovskis from Latvia, was our pastor. He was a Capuchin who had suffered many years in concentration camps. He gave me my First Holy Communion and heard my first confession. His profound holiness and simple, reverent way of celebrating Mass left an unforgettable impression on me.
Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union, children could not serve Mass; only adult men could. So, I was never an altar server there. But when we moved to Germany at age twelve and a half, I began to serve Mass.. After serving for the first time, the face of Father Ioannis appeared before my spiritual eyes. From that moment, I felt deeply in my soul that I must become a priest. Since then, I have never doubted my vocation. Thanks be to God.
But a vocation needs natural soil to grow Catholic families, the domestic church, and good priests as examples who attract graces and transmit the faith. Through these, God touches the souls of young boys and men and calls them to the priesthood.
Another indispensable factor for a vocation is the constant prayer of parents for their son. When I celebrated my first Holy Mass in the town where my parents lived in Germany, my father said to my mother, “We prayed a lot for our son until he became a priest, but now we must double our prayers so that he may remain faithful.” And they did.
Thanks be to God, my mother is still alive. Whenever I call her, one of the last things she says is, “You remain faithful to Jesus.” Those are beautiful words I could not hope to hear more beautifully from a mother, even as a bishop.
To remain faithful to Jesus is the most important thing in life, for every one of us, especially for priests and those with holy vocations. It means remaining faithful to the integrity of Catholic doctrine, reverence for the true tradition of the Holy Liturgy, and a holy priestly life. It means not being contaminated by the fashions and intellectual trends of the world.
This, I consider, is the most important thing in the life of every priest and every faithful Catholic.