A Book Review of Bishop Schneider’s Christus VINCIT

by Bishop Athanasius Schneider in Conversation With Diane Montagna

This book is a blockbuster in clarity.  That is the major take away for the reader.  Everything is clear in language the reader can understand.  It is the Holy Spirit that brings light, and that light is transferred to clarity of argument.  His thinking goes to the soul.  The mind and the soul are in unison on each page, and it is soothing. After decades of double speak by so called scholars and ranking clergy with laity left scratching their heads, it brings us back to the simplicity of the Gospel message.  One must not forget the gospel means “the good news.”  Everyone from simple fishermen to the law-givers understood the words of Jesus.  Some may not have agreed with what Jesus said, but they understood.  The book is cogent and to the point on matters being discussed by the lay faithful.  It is so simple even an intellectual can understand it.  It is also concise with arguments with the defense of the faith that can’t be breached, because the truth if spoken by one is still the truth.

Another thing that impressed me that many may miss about the book is his historical perspective of our times and the role of his family in his own formation.  His family history takes up the first forty pages of the book and says it was fertile soil for spiritual growth.  Usually people gloss over this type of information, but to understand how he evolved, it is interesting to read.  It was not a life of privilege, but hardship in every respect.  His grandmother was a very prayerful and faithful woman.  She would rise early, pray for three hours, and then do her daily chores.  As the day came to a close, she would pray for hours into the evening.  The situation is similar with his parents.  He carries a letter to this day that his mother gave him when he became a bishop.  It is inspiring.  What the young boy saw was faith not just talked about as an abstraction or an obligation, but a way of life — a way that worked. That is the differentiator of many saints.  They saw faith in action at the hearth, the workplace, and the dining room table. His is no exception.  It is faith that sustains a family to spiritual fruit and virtuous living, and he is a living embodiment of that lifestyle.

The book is a treasure and a light in the darkness, in an easy to read presentation when we find so much confusion and anxiety around us.  Bishop Schneider cuts like a laser through the muck and the mire of how we ended up where we are today.  His birth name was Antonius, but as a professed priest he took the name Athanasius.  His superiors must have seen something in him even he did not see in himself as a young man.  That alone lets the reader know what he thinks about the things that are widely being taught in the Church today.  Researching Bishop Athanasius in the early Church will give one an understanding of why he accepted that name, and possibly how he sees his place in the 21^st Century as a voice in the wilderness.  He is a dying breed in trying times, a truth teller.

What is most noticeable about the book is how clear he is on every subject he touches.  Clarity of philosophy, theology, human nature, history, politics in the Church, and ultimately how it is Satan we are fighting.  Therefore we must use the weapons Heaven has given us to combat this evil.

Bishop Schneider has not been infected with the toxic-confusion coming from many in the Church.  Maybe being in the steppes of the Far East has given him a better perspective not being impacted with doctrine that tickles the ears for immediate gratification.  His thinking is not associated at all with western fancies coming from many in Rome and many chanceries.  He states in the clearest possible terms how the philosophies and ideologies of generations and centuries ago led to the demise in Church doctrine and the culture in our age.  He also states it has not been by accident.  We as a people have been questioning beauty and truth that has endured for 2,000 years.  This destructive movement has brought us to a place we have never been before.  It is obvious to him the Church is in a deep crisis and he says so.  To think we are even questioning gender issues shows just how far we have drifted.

Bishop Schneider states Magisterial Truth without an edge, all the while presenting gospel truth as the Lord gave it to us.  There isn’t a subject he avoids. 

At the core for people it is about belief or unbelief.  Bishop Schneider breaks it down when he states,

“In building the new temple of humanity, the first step is to eliminate Christianity, since Christianity is essentially the supernatural, theocentric, Christocentric, and not essentially natural and anthropocentric.  In Christianity, Christ, His Word and His truth, is at the center.  To eliminate Christianity is the first and last goal of Freemasonry—to eliminate Christ as God, as the Incarnate God and Savior.  Freemasons would tolerate a purely human Christ, as a good teacher on the same level of a Muhammad and Buddha, for example. 

Today it is very dangerous to speak only about God and not about Christ as the true God.  Humanistic and Masonic ideology seek to erect this new temple, and they call this the “progress of humanity.”  In this process of progress, man is put at the center not Christ.  Next, natural marriage and family need to be eliminated and their sense perverted, because according to the Gnostics and the Freemasons the evil god, as they say, created marriage between one man and one woman.  It was Freemasons who introduced divorce legislation in Europe.  

He is dealing in the above with two major issues in our culture.  There is an agenda by men to dethrone Christ the King and His Supremacy from humanity, and two, that it is the anthropomorphic — it is man at the center of the universe, not God that is what is most important.  This is humanism and secularism at their finest.  Embodied in that is the individualism of man to express himself as the new supreme-being.  This is a central theme of his throughout the book.  When you take away the supernatural and the Divinity of Christ as the most central beliefs in Christianity, society is on its way to unraveling.  Thus, this is precisely what we see today.

He then states, “In this vacuum, man puts himself in the place of and declares himself to be God, the Creator, though not formally to show that “I am equal to God, I am equal to create something.”  This is demonstrated in so called gender ideology.  But this leads to insanity.  So society has arrived at a mad, insane way of thinking that is tainted with blasphemy, because gender ideology and homosexuality are an enormous blasphemy and a rebellion against the wisdom and majesty of the Creator. 

Of particular interest is his diagnosis of secularism, humanism, and relativism as roots of our dysfunction in and outside the Church, and how they have become the New Dictatorship.  He answers questions in detail: What is behind the movement, the role of individualism, the connection behind secularism and Protestantism, the Islamic invasion of Europe and the West with an agenda of invasion, migration and infiltration to rule, the insanity of detachment from reality and what it has brought us, and the role of Freemasonry as an entity that does not believe in anything but humanism, and the changes of Vatican II.  He speaks of the realization of the supernatural separating believers from unbelievers, the roots of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that displaced a Christocentric view of the Church and the world.  It is 320 pages of the most relevant issues of our times, showing how we have drifted from age-old truth so dramatically. 

The reader will be left equipped presenting their arguments to a progressive liberal in the Divine Light of Truth, with a sincere and Christ like rebuttal with reasonableness and charity.  In any venue from an erudite standpoint the reader will be rooted in logic.  As Proverbs, says, “A soft answer turns away wrath.” 

Schneider is a lightening rod of truth and clarity in a world increasingly growing darker.