[Catholic Caucus] How Bishop Athanasius Schneider Became a Leading Voice for Catholic Truth

National Catholic Register ^ | Edward Pentin

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Bishop Athanasius Schneider was a “model child” who developed a deep love and reverence for the Eucharist, thanks to deeply devout parents and having been starved of the Blessed Sacrament under Soviet communist rule.

This is the picture obtained from family and friends of the auxiliary bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan who is becoming one of the leading voices of fidelity, continuity and tradition in the Church today.

Most recently, Bishop Schneider took the lead in issuing a “Profession of Immutable Truths About Sacramental Marriage” in a bid to resolve the confusion over interpretations of Pope Francis’ 2016 post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), which some bishops have read as opening the door to Holy Communion for some civilly-divorced-and-remarried Catholics. The document, published Dec. 31, states such interpretations are “alien” to the entire faith and weaken the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage.

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Some short excerpts:

In 1973, shortly after making his first Holy Communion in secret, the Estonian government allowed the Schneiders to move to the Baden-Württemberg region of West Germany.

They were imbued with such a reverence for the Eucharist that when they came to Germany, they were appalled to see Holy Communion received in the hand and standing up. As a family, they unilaterally knelt to receive the Eucharist, and other families soon followed suit.

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Knowing one of the bishop’s skills is in liturgical music, Gotovsky once discussed with him the use of guitars at Mass. “He replied to me that the instrument like a guitar is not bad in itself, but it is not the right place to use it. The Mass is not a party.”

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‘And where is this Kazakhstan?’, some may say to dismiss last year’s Appeal to Prayer initiative, as with a 1960s comedy that remarked on a possible nuclear bombing of Kansas with the quip, ‘who would notice?’ A non-Christian comedian, under the character of ‘Borat’, grievously offended the people and government of Kazakhstan with an extremely deprecatory satirical, false portrayal of Kazakh national culture and history. This is despite the fact that Kazakh territory was an historical world crossroads during an extremely important early-modern period, 1200-1400 when all high civilizations of the eastern hemisphere, Roman-Byzantine, Chinese, Islamic Persian and Moghul-Indian, were linked under the Mongol Interregnum. (Marco Polo’s travels were only enabled by the lowering of the borders between civilizations under this dominion.)

Despite the minority status of Christians there, Kazakhstan is a real country whose people are directly called by God to live the fullness of their high spiritual dignity as having the potential to become like Him to the greatest extent, despite the deleterious historical influences of Communism and Islam. Those charged with the care and fostering of this highest mission are precisely those who have been given complete authority to teach regarding the question, how to go to heaven, Kazakhstan’s Catholic Bishops.