(LifeSiteNews) – Bishop Athanasius Schneider spoke out against Pope Francis’ support for homosexuals having the “right to be in a family” and to be in civil unions, saying homosexual acts are “against reason” and “against the will of God.”
In the January 2022 question-and-answer session hosted by the Confraternity of Our Lady of Fatima, the outspoken auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazahkstan urged Catholics to “love the sinners” but to help advocates of LGBT lifestyle to “come out of this unhappiness.”
Bishop Schneider was responding to a question posed about Pope Francis’ 2020 comments supporting civil unions for homosexuals in which he stated that “homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family.”
The question referenced Catholic churches in New York that subsequently held “activities for the LGBT community … to welcome them back,” and one individual who, “encouraged” by the Pope’s words, determined to “marry” a member of the same sex and “have a family.”
“How can you be a good child of God, not be judgmental, but do the right thing in the eyes of God? How can we bring back the concept of sin, without being called names like ‘homophobic, hater?,’” Schneider was asked.
Homosexual acts ‘against nature, will of God’
Drawing from Holy Scripture, Bishop Schneider noted that Catholics have to “love the sinners,” but that this does not mean approving of their actions. He described proponents of LGBT ideology as the “poor brothers and sisters” who are engaging in acts “which are against reason, against nature, against the will of God, the expressive will of God.”
Schneider stated:
“This is so serious that these people are in a very unhappy situation, because they are in a real danger to lose their souls when they are willingly and consciously continuing to practice homosexual acts, or putting themselves in the proximate danger to commit this sin when they are living together.”
Appealing again to Scripture, Schneider urged fierce resistance to temptations of homosexual acts, saying that “we have to … defend ourselves against the sin, or you have not yet resisted against the sin until shedding your blood.”
“Our Lord in His sermon on the mountain said that when there is a danger for the soul you have to cut away your arm, your leg, to throw away your eye when this scandalizes you and brings you close to sin,” Schneider said.
‘Indignity’ to declare oneself ‘homosexual’
While Pope Francis recently doubled down on his support for civil unions in another interview in late 2021, Schneider said that even declaring oneself “homosexual” is an “indignity.”
“Human dignity is so great, created by God, to the image of God, that we cannot define a person by such attitudes as homosexuality or lesbian, and so on,” he said.
“It is completely against the plan of God and we have not to accept these definitions, and these groups who identify themselves and even publicly take these titles.”
A title such as LGBT “is against the dignity of man,” declared Schneider, who urged that Catholics “cannot define a person by his sexual weakness or disorder” lest they signal support of “accepting the lifestyle.”
However, while counseling avoidance of publicly supporting homosexual ideology, Schneider urged Catholics to “seek these people to help them, to come out of this unhappiness in which they are, to come out of their lifestyle with which they offend God and put in danger their eternal salvation.”
Homosexual advocates are deserving of “pity” and should be treated like “a lost sheep,” the 60-year-old prelate said.
Furthermore, the Catholic “mission” is to show LGBT promoters “the beauty of the vocation to chastity, to the Christian life,” he closed.
In 2020, shortly after the Pope’s controversial comments supporting civil unions, Bishop Schneider publicly responded, saying that those supporting civil unions were “culpable of creating a kind of structure of sin.”
Contrary to Pope Francis’ suggestion that creating civil unions is good for homosexual advocates, Schneider condemned such an idea in 2020, saying it would be rather an act of cruelty. “[B]ecause these persons will be confirmed in mortal sin, they will be solidified in their interior psychological dichotomy, since their reason tells them that homosexual acts are against reason and against the explicit will of God, the Creator and Redeemer of men,” he explained.
The auxiliary bishop called on Catholics to pray for Pope Francis to “convert and retract formally his approval for the civil same-sex unions, in order to confirm his brethren, as the Lord has commanded him.”
Schneider is supported by numerous Church teachings on the topic of homosexuality, including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s (CDF) 1986 document “On the pastoral care of homosexual persons,” which stated that a “truly pastoral approach will appreciate the need for homosexual persons to avoid the near occasions of sin.”
“A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally,” the CDF wrote, and any such activity is “contrary to the creative wisdom of God.”
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