Otober 14, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Bishop Athanasius Schneider has expressed grief over Pope Francis’ latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti, noting that it “lacks a clearly supernatural horizon,” misrepresents St. Francis, and furthers the theological confusion Pope Francis created with his Abu Dhabi statement.
Reflecting on the time of St. Francis where the saint was called by Christ to rebuild the Church, Archbishop Schneider says, “Today the Church of Rome finds herself in a similar situation of spiritual collapse, due to the spiritual torpor of a majority of the Shepherds of the Church, the excessive absorption of the Pope himself in temporal affairs, and his efforts to bring about the rebirth of a universal aspiration to a this-worldly and naturalistic fraternity.”
In a new interview with The Remnant, Bishop Schneider says, “Pope Francis presents St. Francis as though he had been a supporter of the diversity of religions.” Rather, the auxiliary Bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan points out, St. Francis was all about converting people to the one true faith. In making his point, Bishop Schneider quotes Pope Pius XI’s description of St. Franics as a man who “set about personally and commanded his disciples to occupy themselves before everything else with the conversion of the heathen to the Faith and Law of Christ.” (emphasis in the original)
Rather than correct the religious relativism that plagued the Pope’s controversial Abu Dhabi statement, which falsely asserted that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions” was “willed by God in His wisdom,” the Pope, according to Bishop Schneider, “did not correct Abu Dhabi but solidified it.”
“It would have been of great benefit had Fratelli Tutti pointed to the need for all men to believe in Jesus Christ, God and Man,
