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Bishop Athanasius Schneider: My personal way to traditional liturgy

Bishop Athanasius Schneider remembers in an interview (rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/…/bishop-schneide…) with with Piotr Falkowski for a Polish daily. his way to the Old Latin Mass.

“My way to the traditional liturgy came in an organic manner, beginning with the education in the Catholic faith through my mother and my grandmothers during the persecution of the Church when I lived in the Soviet-Union. I was also educated in the faith by a holy priest, Father Janis Pawlowski, a Capuchin Priest from Latvia, who suffered also imprisonment during the persecution and was later my parish priest in Estonia, in Tartu.

In that time as a child and an adolescent, I was taught that all things, which are connected with the Holy Eucharist, have to be in an eminent way sacred and sublime. Father Pawlowski celebrated the Holy Mass always turning his face to the tabernacle.

When in 1973 my family emigrated to West Germany, we experienced a profound shock and deep sorrow, observing the new style of celebrating Mass towards the people, like in a closed circle. This style of celebration remembered me the style of the worship at which I once assisted in a Baptist community in the Soviet-Union.

Another shock was for us the practice of the giving Holy Communion in hand. To my parents, my siblings and to me such a practice was really horrible, my mother even cried, when she saw such a scene. I thank God for the great grace that in all my life I always longed in my soul for a sacred and sublime manner of celebrating Mass.”

“As a young man I entered a community of Canons Regular in Austria, where the Holy Mass, it was the new rite of Mass, was celebrated in Latin and towards the Lord in the tabernacle, and Holy Communion given while kneeling and an the tongue. When Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 rehabilitated the traditional liturgy of Mass, it was for me a deep joy, because I myself could then celebrate and assist to a form of the celebration of Mass, which I experienced in my childhood during the persecution of the Church, the same form, which experienced my parents and grandparents.”