Praise for Pope Benedict's letter about SSPX

Canon Lawyer Ed Peters:

One can hardly praise a pope without sounding a bit presumptuous, but here goes: the 10 March 2009 letter of Benedict XVI on the SSPX excommunications remission is a fine document.

The pope's letter acknowledges that the excommunication remissions came as a surprise to all and were issued without adequate contemporaneous explanations. As a result, even friends of the pope were ill-prepared to defend his actions in the court of human opinion (and yes, the court of human opinion matters, as evidenced by the pope's letter itself). Church enemies had a field day amid the confusion, but since that's what enemies do anyway, there's not much more to be said about them. [More.]

Advance text of the Pope's letter and coverage here.