James
Bishop Schneider, Photo by Joseph Shaw, The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales
On a recent visit to the U.K., Bishop Athanasius Schneider gave a remarkable interview to The Catholic Herald. This link will take you to the entire text of the interview. Many of his observations stood out, but the following in particular struck a chord, precisely because you so rarely hear this kind of passion and strong language on the topic.
To my knowledge and experience, the deepest wound in the actual crisis of the Church is the Eucharistic wound; the abuses of the Blessed Sacrament.
Many people are receiving Holy Communion in an objective state of mortal sin…This is spreading in the Church, especially in the western world. There people very rarely go to Holy Communion with a sufficient preparation.
Some people who go to Holy Communion live in irregular moral situations, which do not correspond to the Gospel. Without being married, they go to Holy Communion. They might be divorced and living in a new marriage, a civil marriage, and they go nevertheless to Holy Communion. I think this is a very, very grievous situation.
There is also the question of the objectively irreverent reception of Holy Communion. The so-called new, modern manner of receiving Holy Communion directly into the hand is very serious because it exposes Christ to an enormous banality.
There is the grievous fact of the loss of the Eucharistic fragments. No one can deny this. And the fragments of the consecrated host are crushed by feet. This is horrible! Our God, in our churches, is trampled by feet! No one can deny it.
And this is happening on a large scale. This has to be, for a person with faith and love for God, a very serious phenomenon.
We cannot continue as if Jesus as God does not exist, as though only the bread exists. This modern practice of Communion in the hand has nothing to do with the practice in the ancient Church. The modern practice of receiving Communion in hand contributes gradually to the loss of the Catholic faith in the real presence and in the transubstantiation. …
We are living in an un-Christian society, in a new paganism. The temptation today for the clergy is to adapt to the new world to the new paganism, to be collaborationists. We are in a similar situation to the first centuries, when the majority of the society was pagan, and Christianity was discriminated against.