Leo XIV Awards the Ratzinger Prize to the Theologian Who Criticised Benedict XVI's Liturgical Peace

Leo XIV has approved the awarding of the 2026 Ratzinger Prize to John C. Cavadini, professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and a specialist in St Augustine, and will present it to him on 19 December at the Apostolic Palace. The Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation presents him as what he indeed is in the lecture hall: a patrologist of the first rank. What the Foundation does not say is that Cavadini is co-author, and host editor, of the academic series that in 2022 maintained in no uncertain terms that Benedict XVI was mistaken with Summorum Pontificum. The prize that bears Ratzinger's name goes to the theologian who challenged Ratzinger's most personal liturgical decision. And it is the Pope who signs off on it.

It is worth saying first who the laureate is, because his biography reinforces the thesis rather than weakening it. Cavadini is no campus progressive. He is a creature of Benedict XVI: in November 2009 the German Pope appointed him a member of the International Theological Commission for a five-year term and made him a Knight of St Gregory the Great at the request of the then bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, John D'Arcy, who praised him for having recruited solid theologians for Notre Dame. He has been a consultant to the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops since 2006. As head of the department between 1997 and 2010 he hired specialists in Newman, Balthasar, Ratzinger, Irenaeus and Gregory Nazianzen and set straight a faculty that until then had been looking towards Canterbury. In 2006 he reproached Father Jenkins in writing because his defence of The Vagina Monologues scarcely mentioned the Church. And the Foundation itself had already honoured him in 2018, together with three colleagues, with the Expanded Reason Award in the teaching category. No one can accuse him of heterodoxy. That is why the case is graver than if the laureate were a Jesuit from the magazine America.

Between September and November 2022, in Church Life Journal, the review of the McGrath Institute for Church Life which he himself directs, Cavadini published with Mary Healy and the Capuchin Thomas Weinandy five instalments on the successes and failures of the post-conciliar liturgical reform, later gathered into a single text. The declared target was what the authors call the traditional Mass movement, and the timing was no accident: Traditionis custodes was little more than a year old. The three theologians wrote that, by normalising the Tridentine Mass, Benedict «undermined the principle by which, as he himself insists, Vatican II must be interpreted», the hermeneutic of continuity. Put plainly: Summorum Pontificum was an error of Ratzinger against Ratzinger himself. The traditionalist rejoinder was immediate, from Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society to Peter Kwasniewski, and later took shape in a collective volume, Illusions of Reform: Responses to Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy in Defense of the Traditional Mass and the Faithful Who Attend It, which accuses the series of idealising the Liturgical Movement, caricaturing the pre-conciliar faithful and dismissing harshly those who pray with the 1962 missal.

What Benedict intended with Summorum Pontificum he set down himself in his 2007 letter to the bishops: an interior reconciliation within the heart of the Church, on the principle that what was sacred for earlier generations «remains sacred and great» for us as well. And what he felt when Francis dismantled it was recounted by Georg Gänswein to Die Tagespost in the interview published on the day of his death: he read Traditionis custodes «with pain in his heart», because his intention had been that those who had their home in the ancient Mass should find peace, liturgical peace too, and be drawn away from Lefebvre. That liturgical peace is precisely what Cavadini's series declares a misjudgement.

Here the Foundation enters the picture. Nominations for the Prize are proposed to the Pope by a five-member scientific committee of pontifical appointment, today Cardinals Kurt Koch and Ángel Fernández Artime, Archbishops Rino Fisichella and Bruno Forte and the bishop of Regensburg Rudolf Voderholzer, all designated by Leo XIV. The board of administration that signs the communiqué includes Gänswein himself, now nuncio in Lithuania, who this summer again called for the revision of Traditionis custodes and presided at the Mass for the 2025 prize-giving. In other words: the witness of Benedict's pain forms part of the institution that rewards the man who maintained that such pain was the price of an error.

The prize does not arrive in a vacuum. The liturgy was left off the agenda of the January consistory, where Cardinal Roche distributed to the cardinals a paper in defence of Traditionis custodes, and was left off again in June. On 29 July Roche himself assured The Tablet that Leo «is not going back to Summorum Pontificum». On 2 August La Razón added, citing anonymous Vatican sources, that the paper had been drafted at the Pope's request, that he supervised it and «did not change a single comma». Against that, the audiences granted to Burke, Sarah, Müller, Zen and Schneider, and the one granted in March to the sociologists Bullivant and Cranney, authors of a study on the faithful of the ancient Mass in the United States, had fed the hypothesis of a Pope in search of a way out. The Ratzinger Prize to Cavadini is the latest signal, and it points in the same direction as Roche.

It will be said that the prize recognises patristics and not liturgy, that Cavadini signed the series with two other hands and that the authors argue from Ratzinger's hermeneutic of continuity, not against it. All of this is true and none of it changes the substance. A Foundation whose statutory purpose is to promote the study of Benedict XVI's thought has decided that challenging his liturgical peace is no impediment to bearing his name on a diploma, and the Pope has approved it. That an Augustinian should honour an Augustine scholar is an amiable coincidence. The news is the other thing: on 19 December, in the Apostolic Palace, Leo XIV will present the Ratzinger Prize to the man who wrote that Ratzinger was mistaken.