Bishop Athanasius Schneider: We have to renew our faith and trust in Our Lord who said “I will remain with you until the end of the world.” And He is with us. This is His Church. It’s not our Church. It’s not the Church of the pope. It’s not the Church of the bishops. It is the Church of Jesus Christ. It is His Mystical Body. It is His bright Church and He’s God. And He protects His Church. He permits that we are currently passing the Golgotha hours of our Mother Church. These Golgotha hours will pass. But you know that during these Golgotha hours, the representatives of the Church teach that the apostles all went away from Golgotha, except John, so they’re flat. Imagine one of them in some way, one of the bishops and priests right now. And then they met Our Lady and Magdalene the penitent. The other women are representatives of the laypeople. God permitted that they remained faithful. It was also in difficult times of the Church, especially during the fourth century, the area of crisis where the overwhelming majority of the bishops betrayed the Catholic Faith, collaborating with the heresy of Arius. The Catholic Faith was mostly kept lifted and transmitted from the laypeople. This was demonstrated, for example, by St. John Henry Newman in his famous book on the Arius crisis. The fourth-century showed that there were very few bishops who courageously defended the integrity of the Catholic Faith to the fullness of the divinity of the Son of God. And from those times one of these faithful bishops was Saint Hillary of Poitiers. He wrote this famous phrase which is known and I think it’s really up to date for our time. He said, “The ears of the faithful are holier than the mouths of the bishops.” Therefore, we have hope in more Catholics, laypeople, young people, and Catholic families. They’re growing slowly. It’s a work of the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Faith will be kept and transmitted after this crisis, in my opinion, mostly by faithful laypeople such as you. Therefore it’s a pleasure for me to meet you.
This Originally appeared in the following live broadcast, https://livefatima.io/december-qa-with-bishop-schneider/
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