Pope Leo XIV has approved the awarding of the Ratzinger Prize 2026 to John C. Cavadini, professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and specialist in Saint Augustine, and will present it to him on December 19 at the Apostolic Palace. The Vatican Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Foundation presents him as what he is in the classroom: a first-rate patrologist. What the Foundation does not say is that Cavadini is co-author and host editor of the academic series that in 2022 stated in no uncertain terms that Benedict XVI was wrong 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 signed by the Pope.
It is worth first saying who the recipient is, because his biography strengthens the thesis rather than weakening it. Cavadini is not a 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 Saint 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 straightened out a faculty that until then had looked toward Canterbury. In 2006 he wrote to rector Jenkins reproaching him that his defense of The Vagina Monologues barely mentioned the Church. And the Foundation itself had already distinguished him in 2018, along with three colleagues, with the Open Reason Award in the teaching category. No one can accuse him of heterodoxy. That is why the case is more serious than if the recipient were a Jesuit from the magazine America.
Between September and November 2022, in Church Life Journal, the journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life that he himself directs, Cavadini published with Mary Healy and the Capuchin Thomas Weinandy five installments on the successes and failures of the post-conciliar liturgical reform, later collected in a single text. The declared target was what the authors call the traditional Mass movement, and the timing was no coincidence: Traditionis custodes was just over a year old. The three theologians wrote that, by normalizing the Tridentine Mass, Benedict “undermined the principle by which, as he himself insists, Vatican II must be interpreted,” the hermeneutic of continuity. In plain Spanish: Summorum Pontificum was a mistake by Ratzinger against Ratzinger himself. The traditionalist reply was immediate, from Joseph Shaw in the Latin Mass Society to Peter Kwasniewski, and later crystallized 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 idealizing the Liturgical Movement, caricaturing pre-conciliar faithful, and harshly dismissing those who pray with the 1962 Missal.
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