An “internal persecution” of faithful Catholics is under way in the Church, a bishop has said.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider said the sacking of the Rt Rev. Joseph Strickland as Bishop of Tyler, Texas, represented a particularly unjust exercise of authority against a faithful and conscientious Church leader.
“This will go down in history as a great injustice against a bishop who did only his task in a time of confusion,” said Bishop Schneider in an exclusive interview with the Catholic Herald in Cambridge.
“Now it is silenced, this voice,” the bishop said. “That was the evident, clear intention.”
Bishop Schneider continued: “I consider this a huge, blatant injustice which was committed. I know him (Bishop Strickland) personally. I have visited his diocese. He is a man of God. Evidently in his diocese were growing new families with children, seminarians – the true spiritual life of the Catholic faith was growing.
“His public statements in favour of the Catholic faith – the truth – which he felt in his conscience to speak out (on) in order to strengthen the faithful, this was basically the cause of his removal, this voice which spoke clearly the truth.
“He did not do much polemics – you can check his words. They simply state, sometimes in a very clear way, the truth. He was a kind of prophetic voice, but he was for many in the Church an obstacle and they wanted to remove this unpleasant voice from them. This is the cause. We have to be very honest.”
Bishop Schneider added that at the same time cardinals and bishops who are “publicly distorting or undermining the faith” are not only going unpunished but are sometimes promoted.
He said it was “an evident sign and demonstration of … an intention to silence and to stop those communities and bishops in the Church who are still faithful and attached to the faith and the tradition of the Church and her liturgy”.
“It is a kind of internal persecution of faithful bishops and priests in the Church,” he said.
The comments of the Auxiliary Bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, followed a visit to Cambridge University where he gave an address on the right exercise of conscience in public and political life.
They follow the decision by the Pope to sack Bishop Strickland earlier this month and to place his diocese under the administration of Bishop Joe Vásquez of Austin until a new bishop is named.
Bishop Strickland was subjected along with his diocese to a Vatican apostolic visitation during the summer.
Through his social media accounts, as well as a radio programme on Virgin Most Powerful Radio and his website – bishopstrickland.com – Bishop Strickland had repeatedly criticised the controversial Synod of Bishops on Synodality, as well as various other aspects of Francis’s pontificate.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he also frequently condemned the use of vaccines derived from aborted foetuses as unethical in spite the Vatican enthusiastically encouraging their use among Catholics.
Bishop Strickland later told Lifesitenews that he could not explain his removal “except I’ve threatened some of the powers that be with the truth of the Gospel”.
“The only answer I have to that is because forces in the Church right now don’t want the truth of the Gospel,” said Bishop Strickland. “They want it changed.”
At the time of the apostolic visitation, the Diocese of Tyler had 21 seminarians training to be priests from just 120,000 Catholics.