(LifeSiteNews) — Bishop Athanasius Schneider warned in a sermon this weekend that “nothing is more dangerous for a religion” than “interference with the liturgy.”
The auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, defended the importance of upholding the Church’s sacred tradition, including its traditional liturgy, during a visit to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest in Limerick, Ireland.
He emphasized that it is a perpetual precept of the Catholic Church to remain faithful to its tradition, both “doctrinally and liturgically,” The Catholic Herald reported.
“True piety admits no other rule than that only those things which have been (faithfully) received from our fathers, those same are to be (faithfully) consigned to our children,” said Schneider.
“It is our duty not to lead religion wherever we would, but rather to follow religion where it leads, and that it is the path of Christian modesty not to hand down our own beliefs or observances,” he continued. We must “preserve and keep what we have received from those who went before us.”
Apparently commenting on the current “liturgy wars,” Schneider affirmed that “public worship is inherently traditional,” stressing that this involves praying the liturgy as it exists “according to the norms already established by divine authority and handed over by the ancestors.”
READ: Cardinal Sarah: Liturgy wars ‘a true and proper sin’
Schneider quoted the liturgist Dom Propser Gueranger, who said that “every heretic or sectarian who wishes to introduce a new doctrine finds himself unfailingly face to face with the traditional liturgy, because liturgy is tradition, and the strongest and best tradition.”
The bishop took issue with those who claim that adherence to the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) is really about a preference for “superficial” smells and bells.
On the contrary, said Schneider, those who “clamor that the Church is no museum and that the really pious man is indifferent to these accidentals [of the traditional liturgy] only show their blindness to the great role played by beautiful expression.”
In a further commentary on the ongoing suppression of the TLM, enabled by Pope Francis’ Traditionis Custodes and continued now with the sanction of Pope Leo XIV, Schneider said “history has proved a thousand times that there is nothing more dangerous for a religion, nothing more likely to result in discontent, uncertainty, division and apostasy than interference with the liturgy and consequently with religious sensibility.”
“Preserving the precious treasure of the traditional liturgy is part of preserving the depositum fidei,” he continued, adding that the Church has for centuries ensured that “antiquity was retained, novelty was rejected – this is the apostolic rule.”
Schneider previously denounced Traditionis Custodes as “a persecution of a part of the faithful and also a rejection of the entire tradition of the liturgy of the Church.”
The bishop declared in Limerick that “the liturgy is Tradition in its most powerful and solemn form. Only the Catholic Church can say ‘I transmitted to you what I received from the Lord.’”