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May 4, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazakhstan has thanked Pope Benedict XVI for his words on the current situation, in which people are being “excommunicated by society” when they oppose abortion or homosexual “marriage.” Pope Benedict had added that prayers are needed in order to “resist” the “fear of this spiritual power of the Antichrist.” 

“The promotion and justification of abortion and homosexuality or the gender ideology,” Schneider now comments, “contain in itself the spirit of a revolt against God, and in this sense it reveals to have the characteristic of the Anti-Christ.”

In comments to LifeSiteNews, Bishop Schneider further explains that he sees in the promotion of this pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality agenda “the operation of a kind of hidden ‘One World Government’, which in [its] ideological program is essentially atheist anti-Christian, and even blasphemous.”

The prelate sees in this modern agenda a twofold rejection: first, the rejection of “the truth of Christ,” but then also a rejection of the “order of creation” with regard to marriage and life. 

“The killing of innocent babies in the womb of their mothers and the turning upside down the created order of the two biological sexes and of marriage and family,” Schneider goes on to say, “are an expression of the attitude of the Anti-Christ, an attitude which is called in the Bible also revolt and apostasy.”

The prelate adds: “The most characteristic attitude of the Anti-Christ is to put himself in the place of God.”

Pope Benedict XVI had answered in written form several questions of his biographer, Peter Seewald, who then attached these “final answers” in an appendix to his new more than 1,000 page-long biography Benedict XVI: a Life (in German published by Droemer Verlag).

In one of these answers, Benedict speaks of the real challenges to the Church and the papacy today, and he says that they do not mainly come from such incidents as the Vatileaks affair, but, rather, from the “world-wide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies.” Here, he explicitly mentions abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and in-vitro fertilization as elements of this new ideology.

“Today, one is being excommunicated by society if one opposes it,” the retired Pope adds.

“Modern society is in the middle of formulating an anti-Christian creed, and if one opposes it, one is being punished by society with excommunication,” he goes on to say.

It is here that Benedict puts this modern ideology in the context of the Anti-Christ: “The fear of this spiritual power of the Anti-Christ is then only more than natural, and it really needs the help of prayers on the part of an entire diocese and of the Universal Church in order to resist it.”

We might remember here that Sister Lucia, one of the three seers of Fatima, told Cardinal Carlo Caffarra in the 1980s that the “final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about marriage and the family.” 

“Do not be afraid,” she added, “because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.” She then concluded: “However, Our Lady has already crushed his head.” 

Below is the full statement of Bishop Athanasius Schneider regarding the words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on the current situation in the world:

I thank Pope Benedict XVI for having raised this important topic, and I agree with his words concerning our current situation.

The promotion and justification of abortion and homosexuality or the gender ideology contains in itself the spirit of a revolt against God, and in this sense it reveals to have the characteristic of the Anti-Christ.

The advocates of abortion and homosexuality say that God’s prohibition of murdering innocent human beings as in the case of abortion, is wrong, is evil. And likewise they say that the creation of the two biological sexes is evil, and that the contrary of it is good, i.e. the abolition of the distinction of the biological sexes is good. So, the ideology of abortion and homosexuality reveals to be a revolt against God and thus to have the characteristics of the Anti-Christ.

The systematic promotion of abortion and homosexuality or the gender ideology on a world-wide scale is an indication of the operation of a kind of hidden “One World Government”, which in [its] ideological program is essentially atheist anti-Christian, and even blasphemous, because of their revolt against the created order of God.

The Anti-Christ is not only the one, who denies the order of salvation, i.e. the truth of the Divine Incarnation, the truth that Christ, the Son of God truly incarnated, but also who denies the order of creation, and concretely the order of the two biological sexes and of the absolute prohibition of killing of innocent human beings.

The killing [of] innocent babies in the womb of their mothers and the turning upside down the created order of the two biological sexes and of marriage and family, is an expression of the attitude of the Anti-Christ, an attitude which is called in the Bible also revolt and apostasy, and the Anti-Christ is called also the man of the iniquity and the son of perdition, the adversary and the opposer of God and of the order God created in the level of nature and of redemption. The most characteristic attitude of the Anti-Christ is to put himself in the place of God. In this occurs in the case of abortion where man is in practice declaring himself as a kind of god, by declaring to have an unlimited right over human life and over the order of human sexuality.

Therefore, the practice and the ideology of abortion and of homosexuality have true signs of the spirit of the Anti-Christ.

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Dr. Maike Hickson was born and raised in Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Hannover, Germany, after having written in Switzerland her doctoral dissertation on the history of Swiss intellectuals before and during World War II. She now lives in the U.S. and is married to Dr. Robert Hickson, and they have been blessed with two beautiful children. She is a happy housewife who likes to write articles when time permits.

Dr. Hickson published in 2014 a Festschrift, a collection of some thirty essays written by thoughtful authors in honor of her husband upon his 70th birthday, which is entitled A Catholic Witness in Our Time.

Hickson has closely followed the papacy of Pope Francis and the developments in the Catholic Church in Germany, and she has been writing articles on religion and politics for U.S. and European publications and websites such as LifeSiteNews, OnePeterFive, The Wanderer, Rorate Caeli, Catholicism.org, Catholic Family News, Christian Order, Notizie Pro-Vita, Corrispondenza Romana, Katholisches.info, Der Dreizehnte,  Zeit-Fragen, and Westfalen-Blatt.