Bp. Schneider: “Danger!”

At LifeSite Bp. Scheider has commented. Bp..Scheider (and I) were at the Augustinianum in Rome, the Patristic Institute. He knows something about the ancient Church (and so do I).

Bishop Schneider: ‘Nothing more dangerous for religion’ than liturgical ‘interference’
The Church’s ‘apostolic rule’ is that ‘antiquity was retained, novelty was rejected,’ according to Bishop Schneider.

A couple of excerpts:

[…]

“True piety admits no other rule than that only those things which have been (faithfully) received from our fathers, those same are to be (faithfully) consigned to our children,” said Schneider.

“It is our duty not to lead religion wherever we would, but rather to follow religion where it leads, and that it is the path of Christian modesty not to hand down our own beliefs or observances,” he continued. We must “preserve and keep what we have received from those who went before us.”

Apparently commenting on the current “liturgy wars,” Schneider affirmed that “public worship is inherently traditional,” stressing that this involves praying the liturgy as it exists “according to the norms already established by divine authority and handed over by the ancestors.”

[…]

In a further commentary on the ongoing suppression of the TLM, enabled by Pope Francis’ Traditionis Custodes and continued now with the sanction of Pope Leo XIV, Schneider said “history has proved a thousand times that there is nothing more dangerous for a religion, nothing more likely to result in discontent, uncertainty, division and apostasy than interference with the liturgy and consequently with religious sensibility.”

“Preserving the precious treasure of the traditional liturgy is part of preserving the depositum fidei,” he continued, adding that the Church has for centuries ensured that “antiquity was retained, novelty was rejected – this is the apostolic rule.”

[…]

A couple of comments.

First, liturgy is doctrine.  Also, we are our rites.

If you suppress the traditional rites of the Church in favor of those which did not grow organically from the Church’s lived experience in harmony with what was handed down, then you also persecute the people who desire the traditional rites because you strike at the core of their identity, rooted in the relationship of the depositum fidei and the sacred liturgical rites.

When Bp. Schneider says that there is “nothing more dangerous for a religion, nothing more likely to result in discontent, uncertainty, division and apostasy than interference with the liturgy and consequently with religious sensibility”, he is not exaggerating.   Our sacred liturgical worship, at the summit of which is the celebration of the Eucharist, is the principle means through which we fulfill our obligation toward the virtue of Religion, giving God what is owed to God.   If we do not, cannot, properly fulfill that obligation, then everything else is going to be enervated and eroded.