MILAN, Italy, July 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic bishop has stated that the mass migration from Africa and Asia into Europe in recent years is part of a plan to change the Christian identity of Europe.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, 57, told an interviewer from Milan’s Il Giornale last week that “the phenomenon of so-called “immigration” represents an orchestrated and long-prepared plan by international powers to radically change the Christian and national identities of the European peoples.”

The Church, he said, was being exploited.

“These powers use the Church's enormous moral potential and her structures to more effectively achieve their anti-Christian and anti-European goal,” he stated.

“To this end they are abusing the true concept of humanism and even the Christian commandment of charity. "

Asked to comment on Italy’s new and very outspokenly Euro-skeptic Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini, the bishop said that he did not know Italy’s political situation well, but that he applauded any European government’s attempt to emphasize their nation’s sovereignty and “historical, cultural, and Christian identity” against “a kind of new Soviet Union” with “an unmistakably Masonic ideology”: the European Union.

In the interview, the bishop also answered questions about the “doctrinal confusion” in the Catholic Church, on intercommunion, on the dubia concerning Pope Francis’s controversial encyclical Amoris laetitia, and on the phenomenon of children being raised by same-sex couples.

Regarding doctrinal confusion, Bishop Schneider reflected that even forty years ago Pope Paul VI had realized there was a problem in the Church, saying: “We believed that after the Council a sunny day for the history of the Church would arrive. What arrived instead was a day of clouds, of storms, of darkness, of searching, of uncertainty. The smoke of Satan entered through some crack into the temple of God.”

The situation has become worse, Schneider said, leading “the great” Cardinal Carlo Caffaro to say, shortly before he died, that “Only a blind man could deny that there is a great confusion in the Church.”

Concerning recent attempts by some bishops to admit non-Catholics to Holy Communion, Bishop Schneider underscored that since the result of communion is the “perfect union of all the members of the [Catholic] Church”, granting it to a someone who continues to reject the Catholic faith is a “lie.”

The dubia (questions) touching on the admission of Catholics in irregular marital unions have not been resolved, the bishop said. He noted that some clerics at every level had simply decided to allow communion to people living as if they were legitimately married, but that “no ecclesiastical authority has the power to dispense with the Sixth Commandment and the indissolubility of marriage.”

The bishop was just as candid with his opinions about homosexuality, especially regarding same-sex couples raising children.

“The Catholic Church, just like every human person of common sense and simple reason has always rejected homosexual activity,” he said. “Entrusting children to homosexual so-called couples is a violation of a fundamental right of every child to be raised and educated by a daddy and a mommy.”

“The entrustment of children to homosexual so-called couples represents in the last analysis a moral abuse of children, the smallest and most defenseless,” Schneider continued. “This phenomenon will go down in history as one of the greatest degradations of civilization. Those who daily fight such a crying injustice are the true friends of children and heroes of our age.”

Athanasius Schneider, the auxiliary bishop of Astana, was born in the Soviet Union in 1961, the child of minority German Catholics who were sent to gulags after the Second World War. Like other German Catholics trapped in the USSR, the Schneiders catechised their children in secret. Not having much money for train fares, they could take their children to the nearest available Mass only once a month. In an interview with the Catholic Register, Bishop Schneider said that his elders “imbued us children with the crystal-clear, concrete and beautiful Catholic faith of all ages, which they themselves received from their parents and grandparents.”