Bishop Schneider warns of ‘growing’ Communist culture in West by Kennedy Hall for Life Site News
FRONT ROYAL, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) – In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews, Bishop Athanasius Schneider warned of a growing “spirit of communism” in formerly free and Christian western nations.
Bishop Schneider grew up in the former Soviet Union in a German family whose ancestors had settled in the Black Sea region in the 19th century. There were many Germans who settled in that area, and according to the bishop, they were called “Black Sea Germans,” most of them farmers. They brought with them their Catholic faith and culture, amidst an area that was and is largely a mix of Muslims and Eastern Orthodox Christians.
After the Second World War, his parents were “deported by Stalin” into forced labour camps. Eventually his parents regained their freedom and found their way to the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, where Bishop Schneider was born, just south of Kazakhstan, where he now lives. He grew up attending “underground” Catholic churches, as his parents held on to their ancestral faith, even though it was heavily restricted or illegal to practice under the Communist regime that controlled the area.
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Schneider told LifeSiteNews reporter Jim Hale that he grew up speaking German, but also spent time in Soviet schools as a youth, and thus he spoke Russian as well. Eventually the family made it to Germany together.
Hale asked the bishop if – given the rise of government restrictions, ostensibly due to COVID – he saw any parallels between what is happening in our part of the world today and what life was like under the Soviet Union.
Schneider said that he did believe there were parallels, even if things did not appear the same on the surface.
“The Soviet Union and other communist countries sought to reduce all … human existence to materialism, to the material aspects of the Earth,” Schneider explained.
“And this is ever more growing since decades in the western world. A culture of materialism… It’s [a] kind of new form of atheism, which is the other pillar of the communist system.”
