Athanasius Schneider

Athanasius Schneider, O.R.C. (born Anton Schneider on 7 April 1961) is a Catholic prelate, serving as the Auxiliary Bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan.

He is a member of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross of Coimbra.

He is known for championing the pre-Vatican II liturgical traditions and practices of the Church and for protesting certain current policies, including some associated with Pope Francis.

Anton Schneider was born in Tokmok, Kirghiz SSR, in the Soviet Union.

His 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 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 sixty 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.

In 1982 in Austria, Schneider joined the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross of Coimbra, a Roman Catholic religious order within the Opus Sanctorum Angelorum, and took the religious name Athanasius.

He was ordained a priest by Bishop Manuel Pestana Filho of Anápolis on 25 March 1990, and spent several years as a priest in Brazil before returning to Central Asia.

Starting in 1999, he taught Patristics at Mary, Mother of the Church Seminary in Karaganda.

On 2 June 2006 he was consecrated a bishop at the Altar of the Chair of Saint Peter in the Vatican by Cardinal Angelo Sodano.

This is the theme of his 2008 book Dominus Est, published in Italian, and since translated into English, German, Estonian, Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian and Chinese.

The book contains a foreword written by Malcolm Ranjith, then the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, currently Archbishop of Colombo and Metropolitan head of the church in Sri Lanka.

In the book, Schneider writes that receiving Holy Communion in this way had become standard practice in the church by the 5th century, and that Pope Gregory I strongly chastised priests who refused to follow this tradition.

He wrote in 2009: "The awareness of the greatness of the eucharistic mystery is demonstrated in a special way by the manner in which the body of the Lord is distributed and received."

Schneider has upheld the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church that divorce and remarriage constitutes the mortal sin of adultery, which condition renders one ineligible to receive Holy Communion.

In 2011 he was transferred to the position of auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Astana.

He is the General Secretary of the Bishops' Conference of Kazakhstan.

Schneider speaks German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Italian, and he reads Latin and Ancient Greek.

Schneider is known for his traditionalism.

He has criticized clergy members who he believes do not fully adhere to the faith and instead surrender to what he calls a "cruel pagan world."

In 2014, he compared them to "members of the clergy and even bishops who put grains of incense in front of the statue of the emperor or of a pagan idol or who delivered the books of the Holy Scripture to be burned."

He alleged that the present Catholic Church is beset by "traitors of the Faith."

Schneider has frequently travelled to conferences hosted by conservative and traditional Catholics.

In a 2014 interview, Schneider said that calls to change this practice came from "anti-Christian media."

He suggested this was "a false concept of mercy," saying: "It is comparable to a doctor who gives a [diabetic] patient sugar, although he knows it will kill him."

In 2016, Pope Francis released the apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia which seemed to allow divorced and civilly remarried persons to take the Eucharist under some circumstances, and this was put into practice by some bishops, arousing intense controversy.

Schneider strongly criticized this, asserting that the perennial teaching is "more powerful and surer than the discordant voice and practice of admitting unrepentant adulterers to Holy Communion, even if this practice is promoted by a single Pope or the diocesan bishops."

In 2018, he was warned by the Holy See to limit his travel outside his diocese, as canon law only allows a bishop to be absent for no more than a month unless on official duty.

This led to him increasingly appearing at conferences via video.

Schneider supports the liturgical tradition of receiving Holy Communion on the tongue while kneeling, which he explains as a sign of love for the body and blood of Jesus.

On April 7, 2018, Schneider, along with conservative cardinals Raymond Leo Burke and Walter Brandmüller, participated in a conference rejecting the outline proposed by German bishops to allow divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive the Eucharist.

Schneider spoke of the duty of popes to be "custodians" of authority.

On August 25, 2018, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, released an 11-page letter describing a series of warnings to the Vatican regarding sexual misconduct by Theodore McCarrick, accusing Francis of failing to act on these reports and calling on him to resign.

Schneider said that there was "no reasonable and plausible cause to doubt the truth content of the document."

He demanded "ruthlessness and transparency" in cleansing the church of evils, particularly "homosexual cliques and networks" in the curia that he and some others have blamed for helping to cause the abuse epidemic.