Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana, claims that the "Christian life is indeed a warfare."
Bishop Schneider wrote on the biblical grounds for the Church's involvement in local and national affairs of the country in an article published on Life Site on October 25.
"The dramatic situation of 'the whole world [which] is in the power of the evil one' (1 Jn 5:19; cf. 1 Pet 5:8) makes man's life a battle (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 409). The Christian life is indeed a warfare," the bishop wrote at the beginning of his piece.
He referred to the writings of Saint Paul in Ephesians 6:12, which speaks of believers' struggles against the forces of darkness and those in positions of authority.
As a Catholic bishop, he also highlighted the Baltimore Catechism, which summarizes the teaching that Christians are called warriors of Jesus Christ, emphasizing the need of resisting spiritual adversaries.
"In the time of the Fathers of the Church the Christians were aware to be spiritual soldiers of Christ and to fight for the truth even at the risk of one's life," he pointed out.
The Bishop continued by citing other Catholic luminaries such as Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Plinio Correia de Oliveira, Pope Leo XIII, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Saint John Chrysostom, and Pope Pius XII. They had all taught at one point on Christians' active participation in the conflict between good and evil, in which Christians are tasked with defending God's truth and justice against an increasingly wicked society.
During Saint Cyril of Jerusalem's lifetime, the battle was waged against "heresy and ambiguity in doctrine."
Similarly, Saint Ignatius of Loyola emphasized the idea that Christ did not come as a wimpy Savior, but rather as a conqueror who brought war from Heaven to Earth.
"Consider the war that Jesus Christ came to bring from Heaven to earth," Ignatius is cited in his book of Spiritual Exercises as declaring.
Despite being a layman, Plinio Correia de Oliveira was revered by Catholics as a "spiritual knight of the 20th century" for his steadfast defense of the church against the alleged "unchristian spirit of revolution, modernism, and communism."
Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who Bp. Schneider said become Pope John Paul II, summed up the status of the church and the world in his 1976 speech in Philadelphia, USA.
"We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever experienced... We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the gospel and the anti-gospel, between Christ and the antichrist. The confrontation lies within the plans of Divine Providence. It is, therefore, in God's Plan, and it must be a trial which the Church must take up, and face courageously," he said.
Recognizing that the fight would not be easy, Bishop Schneider emphasized that every believer must adopt the attitude of a victor.
"As soldiers of Christ every Catholic should be always conscious of the fact that he belongs to the army of the winners, because 'Christus vincit,' and as Saint John Chrysostom concisely formulated: 'It is easier to delete the sun, than to destroy the Church' (Hom. In Is. 7)," he said.
And in another part of his essay, the bishop also aptly described what the Christian resistance looked like.
"Our weapons are the weapons of justice, and these are the weapons in first place of prayer and of a saintly life, the weapons of the spiritual help of the Holy Angels, the weapons of the sacred science, of the sacred apologetics, the weapons of righteous and honest individual and collective protests against the de-christianisation and moral degradation of the society."
