(LifeSiteNews) — Bishop Athanasius Schneider warned during a Tuesday interview with Candace Owens that modern “elites” are using pornography to enslave children.
Owens remarked that American schools teach students that watching porn is “healthy,” to which Bishop Schneider replied, “Pornography is one of the most dangerous spiritual poisons. So they are giving poison to our children. This is criminal.”
Bishop Schneider noted that it is “proven” that porn is “one of the most enslaving” addictions today, a statement backed up by a growing body of research demonstrating moral, physical, psychological, and relationship harms ranging from increased infidelity and divorce to memory loss and erectile dysfunction to an increase in sex crimes among minors.
“And there is no love. Because only with love can you heal, with true love. We are created by God … to love Him, the absolute Good,” said the bishop, adding that we must learn to love Him “now, here on Earth,” God “who demonstrated his love for us giving His own life and blood for us, dying on the cross and elevating us to the dignity of children of God.”
The bishop went so far as to warn that pornography is “turning our children and youth into animals,” referencing the quote from the Italian poet Dante’s Inferno: “You were not made to live like brute beasts but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”
“This gives us again our dignity and our happiness,” said Bishop Schneider, exhorting listeners to educate children in virtue.
By contrast, the “political social elites” want our children addicted to porn and other drugs because they can thereby “be manipulated very easily.”
That porn can be for manipulation via distraction and dissipation is evidenced by the fact that, as the British Psychological Society has pointed out, “all major combatants involved in World War II” used pornography as a minor part of their psychological operations strategy.
Bishop Schneider called upon listeners to launch a crusade to “free our children” “from the slavery” of pornography as well as the “satanic gnostic” ideology that opposes marriage. The restoration of “true wisdom” and “true virtue” is “ultimately only possible with the help of God” who is Wisdom, Love, and Truth Itself, noted the prelate.
When Owens told Bishop Schneider that she grapples with whether “it’s natural for people to want to be enslaved because they don’t have the courage to be free,” he replied, “Exactly,” pointing out that people often do not want to deal with the “unpleasant” consequences of living as a truly, spiritually free person.
Yet, he noted, “in history we admire all people who resisted the common current,” such as St. Thomas More or Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
“And for your own self-esteem, you must reject any form of slavery. You must be independent. But you only will be free when you find the truth and virtue and love. Then you are free. Then you have no fear. Then you are fearless. Then you fear only God.”