(LifeSiteNews) — Bishop Athanasius Schneider stressed the importance of reverence toward God in a Friday interview, saying that it is a question of taking God “seriously.”
The Kazakhstan bishop began by telling Daily Wire host Michael Knowles how as a child he lived under the Soviet regime and grew up in the “catacombs” of the Catholic Church, with his parents helping to organize “secret Masses.”
Schneider considers growing up in a “persecuted Church” and receiving the Catholic faith as “mother’s milk” during this time to be “one of the greatest gifts” of his life.
Upon moving to West Germany in the 1970s after the Second Vatican Council, he and his family were “shocked” to see the radical changes that had been made to the Catholic Mass, with its newfound “lack of reverence, sacredness, and seriousness.”
Knowles noted that Schneider had witnessed an “amazing flip” whereby he was born into a suppressive regime that persecuted the Church from without and came to find “oppression from within.” The Daily Wire host went on to cite Pope Benedict XVI’s observation that the changes made during Vatican II were “part of the consequence of that cultural revolution, but also part of the cause of that cultural revolution.”
Schneider emphatically agreed with Knowles: “They started persecution within the Church … And we did not accept the novelties of lack of respect during the Holy Mass,” adding that he and his family always received Holy Communion kneeling, since the Eucharist is Jesus Christ Himself, who is “the Lord, the King.”
And yet, during the Novus Ordo Missae, they were “obliged to stand, to pay a minimal sign of reverence.” Moreover, after Vatican II, they discovered that “so many things” the Church clergy taught were “ambiguous, not certain.”
“You will never give your life for something which is ambiguous,” said Bishop Schneider, adding that people will only give their life for something they are “convinced” is true.
The bishop believes we have now in the Church reached “the heights” and the “culmination” of what has begun with “ambiguity,” in order to “pleas(e) the world.”
“And this is the problem, the deepest problem with the crisis of the Church. They want to please the world. They want to have recognition and sympathy from the world. But this is an illusion,” said the bishop, citing Jesus Christ’s warning to his followers that just as he was persecuted they too would always be persecuted.
Knowles took the position of devil’s advocate, questioning, “What does it matter if I receive the Holy Sacrament kneeling or on the tongue as opposed to standing and with my hands out? … Aren’t these just superfluities?”
“It matters,” Schneider replied. “It’s a question of taking God serious(ly). God is not something which we can treat as we like. God is God.”
He observed that “a deep desire to manifest to God reverence, even exteriorly,” is “profoundly inscribed in our nature,” and “the basic attitude of every human being,” so much so that even in non-Christian religions, humans have always sought to deeply express “true reverence.”
The bishop went on to lament how in many places worship “became a kind of entertainment. And so the center became man,” God was expelled from the center, and we began to worship ourselves, which “is the death of every true religious sense.”
Our exterior expressions of reverence are “an expression of your interior faith, of your interior love of God,” Schneider noted. “When you really believe in God – and He is unending majesty and beauty and love – you will simply fall down and adore him. You cannot say it is the same to stand or not.”
He pointed out that even when a man receives another man of importance or great rank, such as king, he will carefully prepare even “the smallest details” in honor of this person.
“The napkin, the types of glass,” Knowles chimed in.
The bishop continued, “You will not appear in this solemn reception just in jeans or in t-shirts. It would not be acceptable … it would be an offense for your guest. But this is only a mortal person.”
This is why, he said, the Catholic Church for “2,000 years instinctively manifested the maximum that she could in exterior signs. This was a manifestation not simply of formalism. No, it was a manifestation of Faith. It was a manifestation also of love.”
“When you love someone, you also respect him,” said Bishop Schneider, giving as an example the young man who, when he “loves a girl,” will present “beauty” to her in the forms of flowers and other tokens of affection.
“Therefore, we must urgently restore in the Catholic Church again the proven, millennium-old forms of worship which were practiced with love, with faith.”
Schneider later spoke of the contrast between Simon the Pharisee and the “sinner” woman who anointed Christ’s feet with precious, expensive nard oil. Christ praised the woman to Simon when the Pharisee dared question Christ for allowing her to touch Him. He told Simon, “I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.”
Knowles said he was reminded in their conversation of philosopher René Guénon’s insight that “the real divide in modernity is not a divide between nations or necessarily even a divide among ideologies,” but is instead “a divide in an understanding of the sacred” – whereas before modernity, “people at least had a sense of the Sacred,” modernity seems “immune to the sacred” or even “averse” to it.
Asked how we as a society are to restore a sense of the sacred, Bishop Schneider advised that we must “believe in a right manner, live in a right manner,” and pray in a right manner.”
He advised Catholics to consult the old catechisms that “are crystal clear” and contain “no ambiguous language.” The bishop himself has written an up-to-date catechism entitled “Credo,” which addresses many modern moral issues as well as each facet of the plan for restoration of society: right belief, right moral action, and prayer and worship.
“We must first keep the faith. This is the greatest treasure which God gave us – the revealed truths. They are Divine, they are beautiful, they make us happy,” the bishop said. God has “entrusted to the apostles” and their successors “to keep, explain, and transmit” this truth “inviolably until the second coming of Christ, to all generations.”
“One of the greatest signs of charity to our neighbor is to transmit to him the truth,” he said.