(LifeSiteNews) — Pope Leo XIV will personally award a theologian who challenged Summorum Pontificum with this year’s Ratzinger Prize.
Vatican News announced Tuesday that Dr. John C. Cavadini, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, had been selected by the Scientific Committee of the “Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation” to receive the award, named in honor of Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Leo XIV has approved the award and will personally present it to Cavadini in the Apostolic Palace on December 19.
Cavadini, who has dedicated his studies especially to the Church Fathers and to St. Augustine, was co-author of a series published in 2022 by Church Life Journal that argued that those who attend the traditional Latin Mass should cease doing so, returning to the Novus Ordo Missae instead.
“We hold that it is time for those who have become part of the Tridentine liturgical movement to reconsider their position,” Cavadini wrote along with Mary Healy and Thomas Weinandy. The authors maintained that it is “incumbent on those in the Tridentine movement, for the well-being of the Body of Christ, to return to the Church’s ordinary liturgical form,” in the interest of “unity.”
The authors believe that the traditional Latin Mass is in fact deficient due to its “failure” to fully express the “priesthood” of the laity.
“What was and still is absent in the Tridentine Mass is the full expression of the baptismal priesthood and its corresponding liturgical interaction with the ordained priesthood,” they wrote. “The Tridentine Mass risks accentuating the ordained priesthood while undervaluing the priesthood of the faithful, so that neither the celebrant nor the laity fully enact their rightful liturgical roles in relationship to one another. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council must be understood as a retrieval of this common priesthood grounded in the single priesthood of Jesus Christ.”
Their assertions are contrary to Benedict’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which clarified that the Old Mass was never abolished, and every priest in the entire world has the right to say it and does not need his bishops’ permission to do so.
“What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us, too,” Benedict wrote.
Several commentators on X called the award a “disgrace” to the memory of Benedict XVI.
In response to the news that he was to receive the Ratzinger Prize, Cavadini said, “I have sought to live out my vocation as a theologian following the model of Origen of Alexandria – a third-century theologian who repeatedly declared his desire to be a vir ecclesiasticus, a man of the Church. At Notre Dame, I have been able to live my vocation as both a man of the Church and a man of the academy. I am particularly grateful for this award because it recognizes these two aspects of my vocation as a theologian.”