Athanasius Schneider, ORC (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.
Family and early life
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 Oleksa Zaryckyj, 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.
Training and priesthood
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. 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.
Views
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 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.
Holy Communion
Schneider passionately supports the liturgical tradition of receiving Holy Communion on the tongue while kneeling, as a sign of love for the body and blood of Jesus. 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."