(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.”
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.”