By Diane Montagna
ROME, July 20, 2020 (Remnant) — Bishop Athanasius Schneider is calling on Catholic clergy and laity around the world to unite in a crusade of reparation for sins against Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.
The call comes as instances of profanation and sacrilege against the Most Blessed Sacrament have skyrocketed due to responses to the coronavirus, and after five decades of what the bishop terms unprecedented abuse against the Eucharistic Lord.
In a statement released today through the Remnant (see full text below), Bishop Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, says such abuse includes the widespread practice of “Communion in the hand,” reception of the Eucharist “by those who have not received the sacrament of Penance for many years,” and “the admittance to Holy Communion of couples who are living in a public and objective state of adultery,” i.e. divorced and remarried Catholics.
“In the current so-called ‘COVID-19 Pandemic Emergency,’ horrible abuses of the Most Blessed Sacrament have increased still more,” he adds. “Many dioceses around the world mandated Communion in the hand, and in those places the clergy, in an often-humiliating manner, deny the faithful the possibility to receive the Lord kneeling and on the tongue, thus demonstrating a deplorable clericalism and exhibiting the behavior of rigid neo-Pelagians.”
