Originally published at crisis magazine
Born in Kyrgyzstan under Soviet repression, to intensely devout Catholic parents, the future Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider was essentially raised in the Catholic underground. His parents, who had been prisoners in the gulag, would often travel dozens of kilometers under the cover of darkness to attend Mass. Had they been captured, the consequences would have been severe: gulag, loss of job status, or worse.
Upon moving to West Germany in the 1970s, he and his family were amazed to see the radical changes of Vatican II, especially those made to the Catholic Mass, influenced by the ’60s cultural revolution with its diminished sense of the Sacred.
Bishop Schneider observed that many things the Church clergy taught were rather ambiguous and uncertain. The Church, he suggests, has now reached the “culmination” of what began in the ’60s with “ambiguity” and is now an effort to please the world.
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In many places, Schneider says, worship “became a kind of entertainment. And so the center became man.” God was marginalized to the periphery, and we began to worship ourselves, which “is the death of every true religious sense.”
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