Blue sky after grey dawn: Rome today, view of the Holy Office, the back of the Paul VI Audience Hall and the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica
“We fervently implore the help of Divine grace for all those Churchmen today who, by their words and deeds, contradict the Divinely revealed truth about Jesus Christ and His Church as the only path by which men can reach God and eternal salvation. With the help of divine grace, may these churchmen be enabled to offer a public retraction, required for the good of their own soul and the souls of others. For ‘not accepting Christ is the greatest danger for the world!’ (St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew, 18).” — Bishop Athanasius Schneider
Letter #34, 2024, Saturday, October 5: Profession of Faith
Today I write from Rome.
Sitting in a cafe across from the Palace of the Sendoffs.
Having just returned from two weeks of travel to the island of Badija in Croatia and to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, then to Athens and Rhodes in Greece, to attend a funeral of an old friend, a Greek Orthodox woman.
This morning in Rome, Saturday, October 5, dawned cool and grey and drizzly, but just before noon the clouds dissipated… the blue Roman sky broke through the somber grey, and a bright yellow Roman sun, like a hymn, lit up the sky (photo).
In a similar way, last weekend, an old friend, with whom I have spoken on many occasions since about 2010, in Rome and in the United States, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, issued his own “hymn to the truth,” which he called a “Profession of Faith in Jesus Christ and His Church as the Only Path to God and to Eternal Salvation.”
Bishop Schneider does not have an ordinary life story, and so his theological views have a special character as well.
He was born in the former Soviet Union, in Tokmok, Kirghiz SSR, to German parents, and as a boy experienced life as a member of an “underground” Church in the USSR. This experience gives Schneider’s Christian testimony a special character.
Schneider’s parents were Black Sea Germans (ethnic German settlers who lived along the northern coast of the Black Sea in the Russian Empire), who at the end of World War II were evacuated to Berlin, then deported (by the Soviet victors) to a labor camp in Krasnokamsk in the Ural Mountains. His family was closely involved with the underground church. Schneider’s mother Maria was one of several women to shelter the Blessed Oleksiy Zaryckyy, a Ukrainian priest later imprisoned at the infamous Karlag and in 1963 martyred by the Soviet regime for his ministry. The family relocated to the Kirghiz SSR after being released from the camps, then left Central Asia for Estonia. As a boy, Schneider and his three siblings would attend clandestine Masses with their parents, often traveling 60 miles from the family’s home in Valga to Tartu, taking the first train in the morning under the cover of darkness and returning with the last train at night. Due to the great distance, infrequent visits by the clergy, and crackdowns by the Soviet authorities, they were able to make the trip only once a month. In 1973, shortly after making his first Holy Communion in secret, Schneider emigrated with his family to Rottweil in West Germany. (link)
So Schneider is spiritually and intellectually a product of both the German and the Soviet communist intellectual and spiritual worlds.
Schneider was prompted to issue this “hymn to the truth” in response to what Pope Francis said on September 13 during an interreligious meeting in Singapore, during his long trip to southeast Asia: “Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio.” (“All religions are a path to arrive at God.”) (video footage here; official transcript here; official English translation here).
Now, it is certainly part of the Christian tradition to respect and honor all that is good and virtuous in the religious beliefs and practices of mankind. This is expressed quite clearly by St. Paul in Chapter 17 of Acts, where St. Paul, having come to Athens, sees the statue among the other pagan gods worshiped by the Greeks “to the unknown god,” and spoke as follows:
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’[b] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’[c]
29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
32 When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” 33 At that, Paul left the Council. 34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.
So St. Paul set the religious seeking and longing of all humans in the context of the coming into the world of Jesus Christ, the unique savior of the world, the Risen One.
And this is what Schnedier emphasizes in his “Profession of Faith.”
Schneider proclaimed his Profession of Faith at the Catholic Identity Conference, an annual event held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA at the end of September. My colleague Matt Gaspers was in attendance and recorded His Excellency’s proclamation (link), which begins:
“We unshakably believe and profess what the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Church has continuously and infallibly taught since the time of the Apostles, namely,
“That faith in Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God and only Savior of mankind, is the only religion willed by God.”
Bishop Schneider’s Profession of Faith was originally published by The Remnant Newspaper (link), whose longtime editor Michael Matt is one of the principal organizers of the Catholic Identity Conference. The full text also appears on His Excellency’s personal website (link), and it has been reprinted by OnePeterFive (link) and LifeSiteNews (link).
—RM
Profession of Faith in Jesus Christ and His Church as the Only Path to God and to Eternal Salvation (link)
By Bishop Athanasius Schneider
September 28, 2024 (The Remnant Newspaper)
We unshakably believe and profess what the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Church has continuously and infallibly taught since the time of the Apostles, namely,
That faith in Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God and only Savior of mankind, is the only religion willed by God.
After the institution of the new and everlasting Covenant in Jesus Christ, no one may be saved by adherence to the teachings and practices of non-Christian religions. Because “the prayer, which is directed to God, must be linked with Christ, the Lord of all people, the one Mediator (1 Tm 2:5; Heb 8:6; 9:15; 12:24) through whom alone we have access to God (Rom 5:2; Eph 2:18; 3:12).” (General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours, n. 6)
We firmly believe that “there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12), except the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified, whom God hath raised from the dead (cf. Acts 4:10).
We believe that it is “contrary to the Catholic faith to consider the Church as one way of salvation alongside those constituted by the other religions, seen as complementary to the Church or substantially equivalent to her, even if these are said to be converging with the Church toward the eschatological kingdom of God” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Dominus Iesus, 21).
We furthermore hold that Divine Revelation, faithfully transmitted by the Church’s perennial Magisterium, forbids affirming:
That all religions are paths to God,
That the diversity of religious identities is a gift of God, and
That the diversity of religions is an expression of the wise will of God the Creator.
We hold, therefore, that Christians are not simply “travelling companions” along with adherents of false religions — which God forbids.
We fervently implore the help of Divine grace for all those churchmen today who, by their words and deeds, contradict the Divinely revealed truth about Jesus Christ and His Church as the only path by which men can reach God and eternal salvation. With the help of divine grace, may these churchmen be enabled to offer a public retraction, required for the good of their own soul and the souls of others. For “not accepting Christ is the greatest danger for the world!” (St. Hilary of Poitiers, In Matth. 18).
By the prayers, tears and sacrifices of all the true sons and daughters of the Church, and especially of the “little ones” in the Church, may the Shepherds of the Church, and first and foremost Pope Francis, receive the grace to emulate the Apostles, countless Martyrs, numerous Holy Roman Pontiffs and a multitude of Saints, especially St. Francis of Assisi, who “was a Catholic and an entirely apostolic man, who set about personally and commanded his disciples to occupy themselves before everything else with the conversion of the heathen to the Faith and Law of Christ.” (Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Rite Expiatis, 37)
We believe and, with God’s grace, are ready to give our lives for this Divine truth pronounced by Jesus Christ: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
+ Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana with the Participants of the Catholic Identity Conference 2024
Pittsburgh, September 29, 2024
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