Cardinal Sarah ambiguities on doctrine can lead to dangerous opinions.Bishop Schneider tells Candace Owens: The Catholic Church was the ‘greatest enemy’ of Soviet Communists
The ‘greatest enemy’ of the Soviet Communists ‘was not so much the so-called Western World,’ Bishop Athanasius Schneider said, but the Catholic Church, and ‘especially the Vatican’ because the popes ‘boldly resisted communism’ and condemned it.
Bishop Athanasius SchneiderCandace Owens/YouTube
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(LifeSiteNews) — The greatest enemy of the Soviet communists was the Catholic Church, Bishop Athanasius Schneider told Candace Owens during a Tuesday interview.
Bishop Schneider, who recounted that his German grandfather was killed as part of Joseph Stalin’s purge “simply because he was a Catholic,” shared with Owens how the Communists saw Christianity as an “obstacle” to their desired “atheist materialistic” society.
Those who practiced and professed their faith, through worship or keeping religious icons and crosses in their homes, were perceived as an enemy of the state’s atheist ideology, the bishop said. Religion, including Catholicism, was also smeared as against reason and “anti-scientific” in schools, in contrast with atheism, which was seen as a “scientific” worldview.
Bishop Schneider remarked that, interestingly, the “greatest enemy” of the Soviet Communists “was not so much the so-called Western World,” but the Catholic Church – and “especially the Vatican, because at that time, until Vatican II, the popes all boldly resisted communism” and even “publicly accused” it of its “atrocities” and “lies.”
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In fact, the popes have repeatedly, formally, and vehemently condemned Communism, including in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Divini Redemptoris on atheistic communism, and in Venerable Pope Pius XII’s 1949 Decree Against Communism. In 1846, Blessed Pope Pius IX denounced Communism in Qui Pluribus as “absolutely contrary to the natural law itself,” declaring that “once adopted, [it] would utterly destroy the rights, property and possessions of all men, and even society itself.”
Thus, since the Soviets saw the Vatican as “the greatest moral authority in the world,” its opposition to Communism made the Catholic Church its “greatest enemy.”
As a result of this, the Soviets would arrest priests who were simply giving the sacraments covertly and label them “secret agents of the Vatican.”
When asked by Owens where this resistance to the Catholic Church came from, Bishop Schneider remarked, “The first who denied authority was the devil.”
He recalled how in the beginning of the Holy Scripture, the Book of Genesis, the devil questioned God’s command to Adam and Eve to refrain from eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
“Since then, the devil is influencing people with this poison… to challenge and to deny reality. And then the devil said, ‘You will be like God.’ This is the most dangerous temptation for all human beings in societies.”
Bishop Schneider added that this rebellion against God and against reality is manifesting in a hatred of marriage and even of the two God-given sexes. The inversion of good and evil has also resulted in a global “genocide” of the unborn.
According to this gnostic worldview, which resurfaced in freemasonic ideology “which we are now witnessing,” said Bishop Schneider, man attempts to establish “what is good and what is evil.”
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- anti-Catholic persecution
- Bishop Athanasius Schneider
- Candace Owens
- Catholic
- Catholic Church
- Catholic Faith
- Communism
- Faith
- Martyrs
- Persecution
- popes
- Soviet Union
- Soviets
- Vatican
In the midst of the swirling storm of confusion shaking the Church in 2015, Sarah’s most helpful book, God or Nothing, A Conversation on Faith, was released. The 284-page published interview with the cardinal, currently Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and formerly the head of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, which oversaw all the Church’s aid agencies in the world, is a treasure trove of wisdom, holiness, and clear, totally unambiguous teaching on faith-related issues of the day - it is a real pleasure to read. He does not avoid addressing even the most controversial issues.
The book also relates the inspiring journey from a very simple life in an African village to the appointment as an influential cardinal of the Catholic Church of a truly holy man. I have been reading it for the past few weeks and have been so impressed that I am including below some notable excerpts for the benefit of LifeSite readers. I believe you will appreciate the excerpts. Better still, buy the book.
During the 2014 Synod on the family, Cardinal Walter Kasper made some demeaning remarks about the African cardinals who were frustrating his and others’ efforts to impose their modernist, relativist changes to the Church’s core moral teachings.
Kasper was recorded telling a Zenit News Agency reporter that African cardinals “should not tell us too much what we have to do” and that they are "very different, especially about gays.” That translated in many minds into, “they are still faithful, whereas we more advanced Europeans don’t believe all that morality stuff anymore.” Kasper went on a bit more to indicate he believed the Africans to be out-of-date simpletons.
God or Nothing reveals that Cardinal Robert Sarah, one of those African bishops who actively opposed Kasper’s proposals, is a highly aware, soft-spoken, intelligent and learned prince of the Church. This man, whose humble demeanor seems similar to that of the brilliant and holy Pope Benedict, understands well the machinations of the world, but also, unlike Kasper, he strives to maintain a constant spiritual link to His Lord to guide his every action and word.
After reading God or Nothing, one cannot help but conclude how very wrong Cardinal Kasper is about the intelligence and wisdom of the African cardinals such as Sarah.
I start first with a series of excerpts of Sarah’s answer to an initial question from his interviewer, Nicolas Diat: What are the most worrisome signs today, and your opinion, for the future of the church? Quotes following that are related to other questions that were not necessary to re-print.
As head of Cor Unum, Cardinal Sarah witnessed the scandalous leftist ideological and political emphases of most Western bishops’ conferences’ international aid agencies, such as Canada’s Development and Peace and the US Bishops’ Catholic Relief Services. But there were many more as well, such as the German bishops’ agency, that were every bit as distant from their mandate to be in the service of the Gospel. Sarah undertook major actions to attempt to redirect the agencies back to their Catholic mission.
In these statements, you will notice as well his responses to other controversies that LifeSite readers have encountered in our reports.
Cardinal Sarah (book page of
each quote section is noted):
p. 112 - There is a missionary trend that emphasizes political involvement or struggle and social-economic development; This approach offers a diluted interpretation of the gospel and of the proclamation of Jesus.
p. 114 - A priest who has interiorized his priestly life is careful to communicate his encounter with God in a comprehensible way. He will be capable of speaking simply. Some have intellectualized and complicated the Christian message so much that a great number of people are no longer touched by or interested in the teaching of the church.
p. 115 - Fathers of the church knew how to express themselves in a moving way and succeeded in converting whole populations to Christ. Through vivid expressions and beautiful images, they merely communicated their own spiritual experiences.
- One of the major difficulties at present is found in ambiguities or personal statements about important doctrinal points, which can lead to erroneous and dangerous opinions. These bad habits disorient many of the faithful. Sometimes contradictory answers to very serious questions are given by the clergy and the theologians. How can the people of God help but be disturbed by such behaviour? How can the baptized be certain of what is good or bad? Confusion about the right direction to take is the worst malady of our era.
- Contrary to the surrounding subjectivism, the church must know how to tell the truth, with humility, respect, and clarity.
- God did not ask us to create personal projects to transmit the faith. Men of God are conveyors, not interpreters; they are faithful messengers and stewards of the Christian mysteries. Much will be demanded of those who received much.
p. 116 - The first missionaries never separated the proclamation of the word of God, the celebration of the sacraments, and charitable service. Today, we have the tendency to emphasize socio-political involvement and economic development, while excluding evangelization.
- We are misusing the social doctrine of the church without understanding it correctly. It becomes a tool for political action.
p. 117 - The Church would betray Jesus by becoming actively involved in political life.
p. 130- Ideologies coarsen, crush, and destroy men.
- The ideological spirit is the opposite of the Gospel spirit. That is why
priests who choose to follow or to propagate political ideas are necessarily on
the wrong path, since they make sacred something that is not supposed to be.
Ideology is by nature disconnected from reality, and it is necessarily a source
of division, since you cannot win the lasting allegiances of people who are
still anchored in reality, in good times and bad.
On Gender ideology (same page continued)
- Today [the Church] must address gender ideology, which John Paul II did not hesitate to describe as a "new ideology of evil”. Moreover gender, the product of reflection by American structuralists, is a deformed child of Marxist thinking. In his last book, Memory and Identity, John Paul II had already written: “I am thinking…of the strong pressure from the European Parliament to recognize homosexual unions as an alternative type of family, the right to adopt children. It is legitimate, even necessary to ask whether this is not the work of another ideology of evil, more subtle and hidden, perhaps, intent upon exploiting human rights themselves against man and against the family.”
- Gender ideology conveys a crude lie, since the reality of the human being as man and woman is denied. The lobbies and the feminist movement promote it with violence. It has rapidly been transformed into a battle against the social order and its values. Its objective does not just stop at the deconstruction of the [human] subject; It is interested above all in the deconstruction of the social order. Is about sowing discord over the legitimacy of social norms and introducing a suspicion over the model of heterosexuality; for [proponents of] gender [theory], it is necessary to abolish Christian civilization and construct a new world.
