Leo XIV awards Ratzinger Prize to theologian who attacked Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum.
John
C. Cavadini will be awarded with the 2026 Ratzinger Prize, announced
today by the Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation. Pope Leo
XIV will present the prize on December 19 at the Apostolic Palace.
Cavadini,
a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, has
written extensively on Ratzinger. Benedict XVI. appointed him to the
International Theological Commission in 2009.
Cavadini is an explicit critic of Benedict's Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum that liberalized the traditional Roman rite.
In
2022, the three "conservatives" Cavadini, Mary Healy and Fr Thomas
Weinandy published a series in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal on the
post-Vatican II liturgical reform.
“In normalizing the Tridentine
Mass, Benedict undermined the principle by which, as he himself
insists, Vatican II must be interpreted: a hermeneutic of continuity,”
they wrote.
They went further: “By reestablishing the extraordinary form, Benedict unwittingly employed a hermeneutic of discontinuity.”
Their
reasoning was that Vatican II had reformed the existing Roman Rite
rather than created a new rite alongside the old one. What was
“liturgically and doctrinally indispensable” in the previous rite, they
argued, had been carried over into the reformed liturgy.
By
normalizing the 1962 Missal as a parallel form, Benedict therefore acted
“as if the revised rite were not in continuity with the old.”
They described a return to the traditional Roman rite as “liturgically unfortunate and doctrinally unacceptable.”
Picture: Vatican Media, #newsCboskjnxsj