Preview: When and How Francis Unmade the Liturgical Peace Benedict Created

A look at Msgr Gänswein's new book and what it reveals about how Pope Benedict felt when Francis insulted him by issuing Traditionis Custodes.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

No, that Pope Francis “broke the heart” of Pope Benedict with his banning of the ancient rite in Latin is just not written anywhere, in these exact words, in the book “Nothing but the Truth” in which Georg Gänswein recounts his life alongside the deceased pope, about to be released in several languages.

But in the four pages in the book that describe what happened on that occasion, there is all the bitterness that Benedict felt on July 16 2021, when “he discovered, leafing through ‘L’Osservatore Romano’ that afternoon, that Pope Francis had given word of the motu proprio ‘Traditionis custodes’ on the use of the Roman liturgy prior to the reform of 1970,” with which he limited almost to the point of wiping it out the freedom to celebrate the Mass in the ancient rite that Benedict himself had permitted in 2007 with the motu proprio “Summorum Pontificum.”

Benedict “read the document carefully,” and “when I asked him for an opinion” – Gänswein recounts – he said he saw it as “a decisive change of course and considered it an error, since it put at risk the attempt at peace carried out fourteen years before.”

The pope emeritus “held in particular that it was wrong to prohibit the celebration of the Mass in the old rite in parish churches, since it is always dangerous to put a group of faithful in a corner, making them feel persecuted and inspiring in them the feeling of having to safeguard their identity at all costs in the face of the ‘enemy’.”

And it didn’t end there; on the contrary. “After a couple of months, reading what Pope Francis had said on September 12 2021 during the conversation with the Slovak Jesuits in Bratislava, the pope emeritus frowned at one of his statements: ‘Now I hope that with the decision to stop the automatism of the ancient rite we can return to the true intentions of Benedict XVI and John Paul II. My decision is the result of a consultation with all the bishops of the world made last year’.”

“And even less appreciation,” Gänswein continues, “was roused in him by the anecdote the pontiff recounted right after this.” An anecdote transcribed as follows by “La Civiltà Cattolica,” in which the whole conversation between Francis the Jesuits of Slovakia was published:

“A cardinal told me that two newly ordained priests came to him asking him for permission to study Latin so as to celebrate well. With a sense of humor he replied: ‘But there are many Hispanics in the diocese! Study Spanish to be able to preach. Then, when you have studied Spanish, come back to me and I’ll tell you how many Vietnamese there are in the diocese, and I’ll ask you to study Vietnamese. Then, when you have learned Vietnamese, I will give you permission to study Latin.’ So he made them ‘land,’ he made them return to earth.”

To Joseph Ratzinger, what “appeared incongruous” – Gänswein writes – was above all “that reference to his ‘true intentions’,” to which Francis had said he wanted to get back, when in reality the motu proprio “Traditionis custodes” went entirely against Benedict’s purpose, as summarized in the 2010 book-length interview “Light of the World”: “My main reason for making the previous form more available was to preserve the internal continuity of Church history.” This is because “in a community in which prayer and the Eucharist are the most important things, what was earlier supremely sacred cannot be entirely wrong. The issue was internal reconciliation with our own past, the intrinsic continuity of faith and prayer in the Church.”

In addition, after reading that Pope Francis justified his decision as “the result of a consultation with all the bishops of the world made last year,” to Benedict “it remained mysterious why the results of the consultation were not disclosed.” All the more since he, as pope, after the publication of “Summorum Pontificum” in 2007, “had regularly asked the bishops, on the occasion of their ‘ad limina’ visits, how the application of that legislation was proceeding in their dioceses, always getting from this a positive impression.”

That wraps up what Gänswein’s account has to say about this episode. But it must also be recalled that in 2009, two years after the publication of the motu proprio “Summorum Pontificum,” Benedict XVI went through one of the stormiest times of his pontificate, when he tried to heal the schism with the Society of St. Pius X, thanks in part to liturgical peace between the two rites, old and new, complete with the lifting of the excommunication of the Society’s four bishops.

The excommunication was in fact lifted. But when the news came out – of which the pope had no prior knowledge at all – that one of the four bishops had made heavily anti-Semitic statements, even going so far as to deny the Holocaust, the peace effort failed and a universal wave of accusations came down on Benedict XVI, who bore the  blame but at the same time reaffirmed the reasons for his actions, in a touching letter to the bishops all over the world.

But that’s just it, what were his reasons? They were decidedly of substance; indeed, they were his “method,” as Professor Pietro De Marco argues in the analysis published below, taken from an unpublished collection of his writings on the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

De Marco is an accomplished scholar of the life of the Church, a former professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy. This text of his is from 2009, shortly after the event analyzed.

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BENEDICT’S METHOD

by Pietro De Marco

There is nothing more obtuse than the recurring judgment that points to Benedict XVI’s 2006 Regensburg lecture as the first in a series of incidents of culpable imprudence on his part – in that case toward the Islamic world – the last of which is identified in his lifting of the excommunication of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X.

I observed, even then, that there was an unmistakable trait in Benedict XVI’s important lecture at the aula magna of the University of Regensburg: the decision not to avoid the “pars critica” within a dialogical design.

That the denunciation and sanctioning of excess should be understood as loyal, effective, preliminary to the intent of encounter is a result of Benedict’s subsequent actions. Since the Catholic history preceding Vatican Council II is the vital horizon of the “spirit” of the Council itself and of its realization, acts of peace necessarily start from those areas of pained traditionalist orthodoxy, even if too much on display, which make reference to preconciliar history. Only a political use of the Council, not its doctrine, has downgraded under the pretext of the conciliar “rupture,” and driven to the margins of Catholic life, the centuries of vital, authentic Tradition to which Catholic traditionalists make reference.

I say right away that, like the concern for the integrity of liturgical history, the gesture of openness to the Society of St. Pius X was also aimed, in Benedict, at bringing Catholic life back to its essential nature of “complexio.” The rehabilitation of styles, sensibilities, and forms of Christian history is intended to act as a paradigm bringing stability to the centrifugal drifts, the subjectivist fragmentations, that are at work not only in advanced experimentations but also in current pastoral care.

But stabilization demands that what I have called the “political use” of the Council should become aware of its own unbalancing excess, of its own partiality; and should draw self-critical consequences from this. Thus the goal of internal reconciliation within the bosom of the Church becomes part of a broader medicinal intervention for the universal Church.

Already the negative reactions to the 2007 motu proprio “Summorum Pontificum” that authorized the celebration of the Mass in the ancient rite themselves confirmed the urgency of Pope Benedict’s medicinal action. In his pages of patient clarification on the intentions of “Summorum Pontificum” he affirmed that the ancient rite is not another rite, that its presence in the Christian people is a constructive memory and its celebration legitimate and appropriate. The longitudinal, historical-traditional richness of the Catholic “complexio” is, therefore, the primary datum from which to draw; and as a result this is how the “moderatio sacrae liturgiae” exercised by every bishop must be understood.

The pontiff’s action was therefore asserted as a revolt against an ideological and substantially “revolutionary” reading of the Council that had been presented by Catholic theological and pastoralist elites and had slowly made inroads among the parish laity. Drifts that have a worrying significance “de fide”. For Benedict XVI it was always a question of taking the risk of indicating “opportune et importune” the excess, when doctrines and behaviors should overstep extreme thresholds of tolerability.

From this there arose repeatedly, in Benedict’s pontificate, the “scandals” foreseen and unforeseen, but opportune in God’s plan. Whether it was a matter of the intense confrontation with Islam, or of the dedication to dialogue with the Jews, or of care for the unity of the Church in the unity of the living tradition, the contingent “scandals” and their painful overcoming led to the parties involved becoming aware of precisely the critical thresholds that the way of Peter, and the solicitude of Rome, find themselves crossing.

This way of Peter is to the advantage of all. Vain and a bit indecent, compared with the profound movement of the pontificate, was that “hostility ready to attack” which Pope Benedict denounced in his March 10 2009 letter to the bishops, that taste for enmity and pleasure in attacking the see of Peter which waits for the opportunity to manifest itself without responsibility and, truly, without intelligence.

The course of the reintegration of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X into ecclesial communion constituted, in the light of what has been said, a further profound and courageous sovereign act, complementary to “Summorum Pontificum.”

The hope that I then seemed to grasp in Benedict XVI’s decision was that of being, personally and constantly, proof of the essential presence of Tradition among us, a presence that could serve as medicine for the contemporary pastoral and doctrinal disorientation of the Christian communities. And there was no doubt that moving in this direction was important and urgent. More urgent, the letter said, and taking priority for Peter’s successor was the “confirma fratres tuos” (Lk 22:32), which bears a sovereign message: “to open access to God for men, not to any god, but that God who spoke on Sinai, to that God whose face we recognize in the love driven to the very end in Jesus Christ crucified and risen.”

It should suffice to consider that the non-acceptance of the magisterium of the Council or the more contingent disapproval of the ecumenical acts of Benedict XVI, by the members of the Society of St. Pius X, are at least symmetrical in gravity to, on the opposite side, the interpretations of the Council as a rupture and new beginning, subversive of the tradition of the ancient Councils.

Striking, and not in a positive way, were the reactions of some episcopates to the lifting of the excommunication of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. On the basis of what indisputable riches do certain episcopates think that one can leave to the tide the patrimony of fervor, charisms, and probably holiness, “that love for Christ and the will to proclaim him, and with him the living God,” enclosed in the men and women of the Society? It must be said frankly that some national hierarchies would do better to analyze their own present incapacities: their tolerance, or impotence, toward deviant theologies and systematic disciplinary and liturgical abuses, as well as toward the permeability of qualified clergy and laity to secularizing ideologies and policies.

The pain and difficulty of this analysis for many of the world’s Catholic elites may be what drives them – with a mechanism typical of the intelligentsia of every era – to isolate the Society as a “group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate” (as Benedict writes in his letter). A scapegoat made taboo, which not even the pope can approach without becoming unclean in the eyes of that same intelligentsia.

The provocative question raised by the critics against Joseph Ratzinger: “Let the pope tell us if we must still follow the Council or return to the Church of the past” is essentially a confirmation of this reduction to taboo of the precouncil and its defenders. But that the “preferential signs for the selection of the victim” should be the catechism of Pius X or the Tridentine Mass indicates how much false scholarship underlies the violence and contempt that have been aimed at the members of the Society.

I quote another decisive passage from Benedict XVI’s letter to the bishops: “The Church’s teaching authority cannot be frozen in the year 1962 – this must be quite clear to the Society. But some of those who put themselves forward as great defenders of the Council also need to be reminded that Vatican II embraces the entire doctrinal history of the Church. Anyone who wishes to be obedient to the Council has to accept the faith professed over the centuries, and cannot sever the roots from which the tree draws its life.”

Arrangements were made right away, in Italy, to benevolently put into harmless and reductive terms the concern for this faith professed over the centuries, which for Benedict is the supreme priority of the Church and of the successor of Peter: “to lead men to the God who speaks in the Bible.” This solicitude should advance, he wrote, not “enmity toward the humanity of today, but the desire to commit oneself day after day to improving civil coexistence, fighting the ever renascent idolatry, checking the decay into barbarism, fostering peace and justice.”

But it is not clear of what use “the entire doctrinal history of the Church” may be if one thus ends up resolving the assiduity with the Word of God and Christian originality: in instances of ordinary public morality, good for all uses, even for contingent political controversy. The Christian residue of Rousseau’s civil religion would suffice, perhaps mistaken for the “engaging and revolutionary” message of the Council.