Posted on 01/27/2025 9:06:00 PM PST by Cronos
In 2023, actor and comedian Rob Schneider celebrated his first Christmas as a Catholic.
“I think the reason the Catholic Church works for me is it’s closest to the actual words of Jesus Christ,” the 60-year-old told the Our Sunday Visitor newspaper from Arizona. (Both the Our Sunday Visitor newspaper and the OSV News wire service are owned by the OSV publishing company.)
Schneider spoke about his newfound faith after revealing that he converted to Catholicism in a social media post on Oct. 31. The actor rose to fame as a cast member and writer for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” and is perhaps best known for starring in films including “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo” in 1999, “The Hot Chick” in 2002, and “The Benchwarmers” in 2006.
He chatted with Our Sunday Visitor after also starring in a new children’s series called “Chip Chilla” and while working on a project about the Shroud of Turin, believed to be Jesus Christ’s burial cloth.
Many things, Schneider said, led to his conversion, in particular, his family priest in Phoenix taking him to see Father Chad Ripperger, whom he called “an amazing priest.”
“We got to hear him speak for two hours and it was really powerful,” Schneider said of the theologian and exorcist based in Colorado. He called Father Ripperger’s words reassuring.
“At the same time, it was ‘prepare yourself and be vigilant, but not fearful,'” he remembered. “His message at the end was, ‘Jesus already won. This is just a mop up mission’ — and I love that. I think it’s true.”
While speaking about his conversion, Schneider revealed that he has been working for several years on a script about the Shroud of Turin, a cloth located in Turin, Italy, believed to have wrapped Christ’s crucified body and to bear his photographic-negative image.
“It’s real,” Schneider said. “People try to dismiss it as a medieval relic, but it’s impossible. They can’t say how — what was done — and how it was done in a (photo) negative.”
“If it was a medieval thing,” he added, “someone would’ve had to think 500 years later there would be this invention of the photograph to get that negative to a positive.”
He wondered at the French Poor Clare nuns who repaired the shroud after it survived a fire in the 16th century: “If you can imagine the dedication of the French nuns who were repairing the cloth of their Lord; how they would make it perfect.”
When performing radiocarbon dating in the past, he argued, scientists failed to account for the newer repairs to the shroud, which led them to miscalculate its age.
“Everything described in the Bible, including there were blood samples that they found on the cloth, everything in there is from exactly what the sacrifice of Jesus Christ — and what the cloth really is, is a receipt,” he said. “The receipt of what Christ paid for all of us, the greatest gift ever to mankind.”
That realization deeply impacted him. “There’s only so many times in life where you can look at something that’s irrefutable and go, ‘I’m going to ignore that,'” he said.
“I think I just want to be open to the truth and wherever it can bring you,” Schneider added.
He hoped that he could make the movie not only because it is inspiring, but also because it could bring other people to the faith.
“Whatever God’s calling is for me, I would be honored, and it would be the only gift that I could possibly give back besides raising my kids in the faith,” he said.
Creating ‘Chip Chilla’ Schneider is also working on a new series for children ages three and older called “Chip Chilla,” available through Bentkey, a subscription streaming service from The Daily Wire. The animated show follows a family of homeschooled chinchillas who embark on adventures and learn about literature, history and culture. The show, which premiered in October, embraces the importance of family and loving one another. Schneider does the voice of “Chum Chum,” the father. He wanted to support Daily Wire entertainment, he said, and took on the role after seeing a need for wholesome creative content.
“It’s been a couple of years already since we’ve been working on this,” he said. “It really was during the height of the pandemic where you had a real shutdown in Hollywood, not just physically but ideologically. And it became kind of the height of where entertainment was indoctrinating people — and especially the family — into some ideas that were antithetical to what entertainment, I think, should be.”
Leaning in on conversion He felt the world going to a darker place, Schneider said, pointing to how places like liquor stores and strip clubs remained open during the COVID-19 pandemic while church doors were shuttered.
“I think there’s been a real attack on Christianity, a concerted, aggressive attack, especially in the Catholic Church,” he said.
In the midst of it all, Schneider spoke about finding and embracing the Catholic faith. “Jesus Christ only lets you wander so far,” he said. “I have young children, and I want (them) to have a nice foundation and a beautiful way of seeing the world.”
Schneider shared that he was recently present when his good friend, actor Kevin James, said a prayer in Latin. “Luckily, Latin and Spanish are pretty close so I’m able to pick up and start to understand it,” Schneider said.
“I think it’s important to be close to the actual words of Jesus Christ,” he said. “And that’s why the Catholic Church, like I said, works for me.”
In an interview with the Christian Post's Leah Klett, Schneider discussed how contending with the 'organized evil' he saw during that multi-year stretch led him to his faith.
Isn’t he a Jew by birth, that is, he is a Jew and will remain such.
He seems to have also become Republican and a Trump supporter at the same time of his conversion
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4293164/posts
That might be true according to Jewish law.
By why should Jewish law be the sole or final word?
According to Mormon law, the Mormons can convert you after you die. So any one of our dead relatives can be declared Mormon under Mormon law.
To which I say, so what?
Mormons and Jews and whoever else can say what they like, but I needn't accept their definitions.
Correct, according to Jewish Law if his mother was Jewish he is a Jew. History shows that when a Jew converts to another religion, that other religion suspects the true intentions of that convert.
If the Jew “forgets” that he/she is a Jew, usually, the non-Jew is there to remind him that he/she cannot escape it. See Aryan Nuremberg Laws circa 1936.
Being a Jew is both ethnic and religious.
A person can be ethnically a Jew and have a different religious belief like Karl Marx. Or ethnically not of Jewish background but religiously a Jew like Sammy Davis Junior.
And Christianity is a 2nd temple Jewish sect, the only one that survived the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.
In that same year, Rabbi Yohanan bin Zakkai, a Pharisee rabbi, created Rabbinical Judaism, focusing away from the temple, priesthood, animal sacrifices to synagogues, rabbis and Torah.
Only after the Kitis war (the 2nd Jewish Roman war), when Rabbinical Judaism zealots massacred gentiles in Cyrene and Cyprus (https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4826-cyrene), depopulating the area (Synesius, a native of Cyrene in the beginning of the fifth century, speaks of the devastations wrought by the Jews (”Do Regno,” p. 2).) Made the association odious. Only after that did the Jesus movement Jews fully embrace the exonym Christian.
In the Persian empire the Christian’s retained the name Nasrene or Nasrani
“Being a Jew is both ethnic and religious”.
There are many arguments about what or who is a Jew but Jewish Law (called the Halacha” or The Way) states it comes from the mother only.
“A person can be ethnically a Jew and have a different religious belief like Karl Marx. Or ethnically not of Jewish background but religiously a Jew like Sammy Davis Junior”.
Karl converted to Christianity and married Lutheranism I think and Communism. Technically, he was a Jew who rejected Judaism and religion in the end.
I will not argue with you but will say I respect your views.
Actually, Netz, that “History shows that when a Jew converts to another religion, that other religion suspects the true intentions of that convert.”
Happened only after the final reconquest of Spain. The reason was that Jews had supported the Arab conquest of Spain in the 8th century and had administered conquered cities under the Ummayyads. They also worked with the Muslim rulers and were given a middle status, below Mohammedans but above Christian’s, leading to bad blood.
After the reconquest the newly created Spanish union feared the Muslims and Jews among them would insurrection. And that led to forced or pressured conversion.
Later those converts were suspected by the paranoid authorities (not so paranoid if you consider they had just gotten rid of muslims who had been ruling them for 700 years).
Jews who converted to christianity or Islam in other places or other times didn’t have their intentions suspected.
And the Nazi anti-semitism was based on nonsensical neo-Darwinian ideas of race, not on religion. The Nazis feared the Jewish “race” taking over the world. Those Nutzis also considered blonde, blue eyed Slavs as a different race. And, while they reluctantly agreed that gypsies were Aryans, they still committed a worse holocaust on them.
The Halacha dates from the 8th and 9th centuries in Baghdad. That is far younger than the jesus movement.
Karl didn’t convert, his parents did before he was born. Communism was not a religion at that point.
Nite that the Halacha comes fro 8th and 9th century Baghdad, the same time the new Abbasid court set up in Baghdad and created Islam. The Sharia and Hadiths borrowed from the Halacha and Talmud.
So to the point, the concept or from the mother’s side is only 1200 odd years old.
Otherwise King David wasn’t a Jew due to Rahab, Ruth
Curious factoid (according to historian John Toland): The Nuremberg Laws were crafted to exclude Hitler and Jesus.
According to Toland, Hitler feared he might be 1/4 Jewish. So the Nuremberg laws said that if you were less than half Jewish, you were not Jewish. So Hitler was in the clear.
Was Hitler 1/4 Jewish by blood? We'll probably never know. But there was enough of a possibility for Hitler to lose sleep over it.
Also according to the Nuremberg Laws, if you were half Jewish by blood, but a Christian by faith, you were not Jewish. This was meant to exclude Jesus because his father was God (not Jewish) and Jesus was Christian. (Silly, I know, but the Nazis wanted to placate German Christians).
That might be true according to Jewish law.
You don't know what you are talking about. His mother was Catholic, so, by Jewish law, he is not Jewish.
And you guys are claiming being Jewish means you are not allowed to become Catholic, that is not true, where do you get such an idea?
So, according to you, Catholics don't exist, since the original Catholics were Jews by birth.
And by the way, the only country I've ever heard follow your formulation.
Even Jewish law might consider someone still Jewish, but they would still consider them apostatized from the faith.
Karl Marx' parents converted to Lutheranism before he was born. He was raised as a non-practicing Lutheran. Who knows what age he was when he even found out his parents were Jewish.
That is completely false! Karl Marx never "converted" to Christianity.
Marx's parents were non-practicing Jews who converted to Lutheranism, but didn't practice that religion very much either, but all the children were baptized.
So, at no point was Karl Marx Jewish in any sense except his ancestors were Jewish. He never practiced, or was educated as a Jew, nor considered himself as such. When he was born his parents were already Lutheran.
Furthermore, he didn't have good things to say about Jews.
Rob Schneider's mother was Catholic. So, what argument do you have now?
May, I ask, why you hate Jews and Christians so much?
This was also used in African slaves. Until the late 1700s it was not as race based as post Darwin when people thought that certain "races" were lower. The English considered themselves a separate race from the Irish and depicted the Irish as subhuman
It was to dehumanize people. And the Nutzis used it too. Their hatred was based on Genes not religion
The Nazis then created “positive Christianity” where they tried to claim Jesus was an Aryan!!!
Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler hated Christianity and called it “the Jewish religion that weakened the German nagion”.
They of course forgot that before Napoleon there was no German nat6but rather German nationS.
You actually seem to subscribe to those laws.
And since you bring them up, they are the only laws of their kind I ever know of existing.
Conversion was allowed, and unfortunately, sometimes mandated, even though eventually that was recognized to be counter productive.
Even Islam welcomes Jewish converts. One of Muhammad's closest companion's and one of his wives were converts from Judaism.
And Jewish converts have even become saints in Catholicism.
The problem lies in that many people forget that
1. Christianity itself is a 2nd temple Jewish sect that took on the exonym Christian after Jewish excesses in the Kitis war
2. What we call Judaism today is Rabbinical Judaism, created in 70 AD, so actually 40 years younger than Christianity.
Reference: the Apostasy that wasn’t by Rod Bennett
https://www.amazon.com/Apostasy-That-Wasnt-Extraordinary-Unbreakable/dp/1941663494
And First century Judaism in crisis by Rabbi Neusner
https://www.amazon.com/First-Century-Judaism-Crisis-Neusner/dp/1597525391/ref=sr_1_1?crid=229UOE4I6ETCX&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.l8z0DJ8LBYj_9uNbXBBqqw.rsWaEms2g5flAoveYtvlWnNxZvTWzcBCbt-D9kyFkTY&dib_tag=se&keywords=first+century+judaism+in+crisis+by+rabbi+neusner&qid=1738046344&s=books&sprefix=dirat+century+judaism+in+crisis+by+rabbi+neusner%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C347&sr=1-1
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