Opposition to reform has coalesced around former Pope Joseph Ratzinger

May 20, 2016

By Robert Mickens
Opposition to Pope Francis is being waged on a variety of fronts.

Those in the “let’s just wait him out” crowd are already doing everything they can to prepare for the day when he is no longer around. And part of their strategy is to continue cultivating a cadre of future Church leaders (seminarians and young priests) who are resistant to the change of attitude and vision the 79-year-old Pope’s been trying to inculcate.

In Rome, their number is legion. Some of them are pursuing their strategy discreetly. Others could not be more blatant.

One thing that links them is a strange devotion to the former pope, Benedict XVI. This is especially true in their effort to keep alive his (and, even more so, his acolytes’) sometimes bizarre and often retrodox liturgical ideas.

Many of them are part of one of the many neo-Tridentinist fringe groups that the ex-pope did much to encourage the past five or so decades, especially during the eight years he was ensconced in the Apostolic Palace.

The Order of St Augustine — commonly called the Augustinians — is decisively not one of these groups. At its international headquarters next to St Peter’s Square, this long-established religious order also operates the Augustinian Patristic Institute or Augustinianum. It is recognized as one of the most academically serious among the many pontifical schools in the Eternal City.

That’s why many people were surprised when it developed a two-semester-long course called, Master in Joseph Ratzinger: Studies and Spirituality.

Separate from its more rigorous programmes that lead to pontifical licentiates and doctorates, this is only the second accelerated Master’s programme to be offered at the patristic institute. The other, as one might expect, is the Master in St Augustine, who was a Doctor of the Church.

Courses for the new Master in Joseph Ratzinger (not yet a saint or a Church doctor) officially got underway in mid-February. There are two separate tracks — one in English, the other in Italian. The list of “professors,” some who lecture in both sections, is — shall we say — “interesting.”

Three of them are cardinals who head Vatican offices — George Pell (Secretariat for the Economy), Kurt Koch (Pontifical Council for Christian Unity) and Robert Sarah (Congregation for Divine Worship).

Another is the retired pope’s secretary and housemate, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who is also prefect of the Papal Household.

Others on the faculty are also activists of conservative causes such as the “reform of the (Vatican II) reform” of the liturgy. They include Mgr Marco Agostini, who works in the papal ceremonies office, and others who are well-known among the liturgical crowd, such as Mgr Nicola Bux, Fr Vincenzo Nuara OP and Oratorian Fr Uwe Michael Lang.

The director of the Master in Joseph Ratzinger programme is a young Augustinian priest from Colombia named Mauricio Saavedra Monroy.

And among those on the six-member committee that oversees the programme (as well as being a lecturer) is Fr Robert Dodaro, an American who is the Augustinianum’s president.

A theological consultant and close friend of Cardinal Raymond Burke, he helped produce books and papers that called for no change in the Church’s current teaching and practice concerning the divorced and remarried.

I don’t know Fr Saavedra, but Fr Dodaro and the other illustrious gentlemen listed above are hardly what you’d call members of the Pope Francis Fan Club. And for some of them, that is an understatement.-- Global Pulse