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 …More
This is rich. One heretic (Ratzinger) has a prize given to another heretic (Cavadini) who dissented from him.
The Ratzinger-Frings attack on the Holy Office (1963)
On 8 November 1963, Card. Frings declared in the Conciliar aula: “The Holy Office’s manner of conducting itself in many spheres is not in step with our times, is detrimental to the Church, and is a cause of scandal for many.”
He was, of course, speaking from a script known to have been previously dictated by Ratzinger.2 Peter Seewald commented that “no one had ever dared before to criticize Ottaviani’s machinery so fiercely.” 3 It is a well recorded fact in the annals of the Council that Card. Ottaviani was several times publicly humiliated by progressivist reformers, especially from Germany, in a manner that defied both Christian charity and the gentlemanly code of ethics. The Frings/Ratzinger broadside, which constituted one of the Council’s most emotionally-charged and dramatic events, was no exception.
The traditional Roman Rite was not liberalized. In fact, Paul Vi said it was a new rite. Cf. Changes In Mass for Greater Apostolate | EWTN