Christus Vincit (Angelico Press, 2019) is Bishop Schneider’s response to modernity as what Pius X termed ‘the synthesis of all heresies’. The Catholic Church built Western civilisation, and now a pincer movement of two great heresies threatens it: Freemasonry underpinning totalitarian gender ideology on the one hand and Islam on the other.
But he faces the darkness without despair. The book begins with his grandmother, newly married, seeing Communists take his grandfather away in the night. They shot him. A ‘catacomb atmosphere’ descended on all Christians. But his parents joyfully told him they’d managed to find a church 'only 100 kilometers’ away, and his grandmother said the Communists would have to shoot her before she worked on Sundays. They left her alone.
Then as now, threats to the Catholic Church also lurked within it. Bishop Schneider didn’t choose to become a Bishop, but he recognises ‘it is better in life that God decides’. And he sees the hand of God in the fact that Bishop Manuel, who ordained him, had seen his own diocese ‘destroyed by Liberation Theology’. Having lost tradition, he knew its value and taught it: accordingly, for Bishop Schneider, 'the meaning of my day, of my life, is the Mass’, and he is steadfast in fighting the ‘dictatorship of gender ideology’.
He sees secularism as, at root, anthropocentrism. Its aim is to 'ban Jesus Christ from public life’. Since relativism means what is true for one generation is not true for the next, it is a ‘flight from reality’. And ‘ultimately Satan is behind it’. Why? Because it is ‘the unhealthy autonomy of man towards God’. Non serviam (I will not serve).
Autonomy is the core of liberalism, and for Bishop Schneider Protestantism is liberalism in religious form. It meant ‘man declared himself the centre, and this is subjectivism’. Not only is secularism ‘the necessary consequence of Protestantism’. Gender ideology is ‘the logical consequence of the independence of man’. It takes sex, the greatest mystery, and wreaks havoc with 'blasphemy, rebellion, and insanity at the same time’ by trying to make man, not God, its architect.
Liberalism — man’s ‘unhealthy autonomy’ — thus underpins woke. And Bishop Schneider traces its genealogy back to Satanism via Freemasonry, Secular Humanism and Gnosticism. As Cardinal Manning said, ‘all human conflict is ultimately theological’. With Bishop Schneider’s help, then, let’s go beyond the secular infighting of the West’s so-called culture war, a media industry for liberals who all agree on sodomy.