Synodality is a “very cunning code word to undermine Catholic doctrine”, Bishop Athanasius Schneider told AdVaticanum on September 10.
He believes the vagueness of the word is deliberate, a means of gradually adapting Catholic doctrine, morality and ecclesial structures to Protestantism and contemporary attitudes toward sexuality.
Monsignor Schneider calls synodality the height of the modernist movement, leading toward relativism. He adds that this openness has one notable exception: the traditional Latin Mass.
“This document will be cancelled”
Responding to the document Mater Populi Fidelis against the Marian titles Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces, Bishop Schneider argues that the Church cannot cancel language found in missals and used by popes, saints and Doctors of the Church.
He believes the document, not the titles, will eventually disappear: “I think, in the future, this document will be cancelled.”
Communion in the hand: “one of the deepest wounds”
Bishop Schneider calls Communion in the hand “one of the deepest wounds in the body of the Church” and says the Pope must stop the practice: “Who opened the dam? The Pope, Paul VI. We must be honest, please.”
He recalls that Paul VI consulted the world’s bishops in 1968 and permitted Communion in the hand despite a majority warning that it would lead to abuses, sacrileges and a weakening of faith.
Monsignor Schneider calls this a “huge historical responsibility” and argues that the practice has produced irreverence and sacrilege, “The Holy See opened the flood, and the Holy See must close it again.”
His mother’s tears and Benedict XVI
Bishop Schneider recalls that when his mother first learned Communion in the hand was practiced in West Germany, she cried in horror. After the family moved there in 1973 and encountered the practice widely, she wept again over how Christ was being treated.
Those tears inspired him to write Dominus Est on the dangers of Communion in the hand.
He revealed that Benedict XVI read the manuscript and wrote to him personally: “Your arguments are convincing.”
Schneider points to Kazakhstan as a model, where receiving Communion kneeling and on the tongue is obligatory. Communion in the hand is prohibited even for visitors, and there are no lay ministers or female altar servers.
A “supermarket of religions”
Finally, Schneider argues against large official interreligious gatherings because they present Catholicism as one religion among equals, thereby relativizing the uniqueness of Christ and the Catholic Church.
He describes such gatherings as an “official display” of a “supermarket of religions”.
Instead, Schneider proposes a “dialogue of daily life”: Catholics living peacefully with their Muslim and Orthodox neighbors, visiting one another and helping families through difficulties.
Drawing on his experience in Kazakhstan, he argues that such ordinary neighborliness contributes more to interreligious peace than large official conferences.
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