Bishop Schneider’s ‘hostile takeover’ warning: what was said, and what can be checked

In Church law the words Schneider used have precise meanings. Canon 751 defines heresy as the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt, after baptism, of a truth that must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, and apostasy as the total repudiation of the Christian faith; the Catechism gives the same definitions (CCC 2089). Canon 1364 §1, in the penal law revised in 2021, attaches automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication to apostasy, heresy and schism. Whether a particular cleric has committed these canonical delicts is a juridical question, and canon 1405 §1, 3° reserves to the Roman Pontiff alone the right to judge bishops in penal cases. The Holy See does act on such charges. On 5 July 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith announced that, at the end of an extrajudicial penal process, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò had been found guilty of the reserved delict of schism (canons 751 and 1364) and his latae sententiae excommunication declared (DDF press release). Canon law also protects the speaker: canon 212 §3 gives the faithful the right, and at times the duty, to make known their opinion on matters that concern the good of the Church, without prejudice to faith and morals, with reverence toward pastors and attentive to the dignity of persons.

The talk, as reported, speaks of heresies among the high clergy; it does not question the validity of the Pope’s office. In a March 2019 essay Schneider rejected the theory that a heretical pope can be deposed or lose his office, and warned that deposing a pope would foster conciliarism and sedevacantism (LifeSiteNews). On 17 August 2026, after Rome declared that the SSPX bishops involved in the 1 July consecrations at Écône had incurred excommunication, Diane Montagna published a statement by Schneider in which he named “sedevacantist groups” among examples of formal schism. In the same statement he wrote that if the Holy See took the Society’s stance seriously and acknowledged what he called “objective ambiguities” in certain statements of the Second Vatican Council and in the rite of the New Mass, it would mark the beginning of the end for the modernist project (Diane Montagna). Nothing in the reports of the October talk ties it to sedevacantism, and the excerpts published so far name no prelate, document or proposition as an example of the “brazen heresies”.