Better Late than Never – once More!

Peter Seewald has given a remarkable Interview published in Kath.net.  The original is to be found here; an English translation here. What is remarkable, first of all, is the man who is speaking. We have reviewed several books by Peter Seewald, written in collaboration with Benedict XIV ( posted here and here). Those of you who have read them know that I have had serious reservations regarding Peter Seewald’s books. He and Benedict tried to continue the party line of the Church establishment: within the Church all is peace, unity and continuity of policy. Here and there in his most recent biography of Pope Benedict, however, Seewald could no longer follow this course. And in this new interview he definitively breaks with it.

Seewald declares that the floodgates have opened! He describes the radical break the policies of Francis represent with those of his predecessors Benedict and John Paul. He details the insults and contemptuous treatment meted it out by Francis to Benedict, Mueller, Gänswein – the list is a long one. He frankly describes the incompetence and worse of Francis’s associates: McCarrick, Danneels and most recently Victor Fernandez.  And he frankly faces the potentially apocalyptic consequences of the pope’s current course of action.

I would single out the emphasis Seewald gives to Pope Francis’s attack on the traditional liturgy – he rightly considers Summorum Pontificum a key achievement of the Benedictine papacy. This passage of the interview is even more remarkable because as recently as 2020 Seewald himself seemed completely unaware of the significance of that motu proprio. 1)

All this is a remarkable change in direction – from a would-be member of the establishment, if a conservative one, to an outspoken critic of it. We have seen over the years numerous other examples, however: Daniel Mahoney, Aldo Maria Valli and even George Weigel. The confrontational radicalism of Francis’s course is driving an ever-greater number of potential allies into the opposition.  A major role in Seewald’s “conversion” is the death of his long-term interview partner, Pope Benedict, which obviously frees him from the constraints imposed by Benedict’s reverence for the Council and the Church establishment.

Of course, it is equally remarkable that this interview appears on Kath.net, a “conservative” Austrian site that has desperately striven to maintain relations of some kind with the German Church and the papacy of Francis – and to distinguish themselves from the traditionalists. They too may have reached the end of the rope. 

Of course, some observers had seen the dam breaking 10 years ago. Seewald rightly says that Francis “from the first day of his pontificate sought to distance himself from his predecessor”  – an insight that Pope Benedict and Seewald repeatedly denied for ten years in their jointly published works.  Nevertheless, “better late than never!”  I will welcome more contributions from the now unleashed Peter Seewald based on his extensive contact with Ratzinger over the decades. 

1. Seewald, Peter, Benedikt XIV. Ein Leben at 872-76 (Droemer Verlag, Munich, 2020)