Bishop Athanasius Schneider speaks at the Rome Life Forum in May 2018.
By Maike Hickson, LifeSiteNews, November 8, 2019
Bishop Athanasius Schneider, the auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, has recently given an interview to Michael Matt, the editor of the Catholic newspaper The Remnant. Speaking about the idolatrous worship of Pachamama statues during the Amazon Synod in Rome, the prelate says: “We have to condemn this.” “Idolatry,” he adds, “is a violation of Divine Revelation” and of the First Commandment. “You cannot commit acts of idolatry in the Catholic Church.”
He further speaks about an “evil” in the Church that is reaching “its culmination” but has been developing “over the last decades.” The current situation shows how much this “evil has penetrated in the Church.”
“Unfortunately,” Schneider comments, “Pope Francis defends the veneration of these Pachamama idols, in saying there were no idolatrous intentions in using them.” Here, Bishop Schneider objects that “we can only see the exterior acts,” not the “hearts of the people.” And these acts “were clearly acts of religious cult – bowing, revering, and even prayers towards a wooden statue” which is, “even the Pope said it, it is Pachamama.” And this is, according to Schneider, a “concept of a kind of a goddess” in the “entire culture of the indigenous South American people.”
The evil, Bishop Schneider explains, “wants to reach always its culmination.” The evil is to deny that there is “one truth,” he explains; and relativism is therefore “like a virus.” “When you don’t resist it, it will by time conquer the entire body,” Schneider explains more and then refers back to the Second Vatican Council. This “doctrinal relativism, doctrinal ambiguity” he states, can already be found “partly in some expressions of the Second Vatican Council.”
Here, Bishop Schneider refers to the Council’s claim that “we adore, together with the Muslims, the one God.” ….
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