In an article for Time magazine, Jeff Israely, author of Benedict XVI: The Dawn of a New Papacy, gives examples of the pope's "troubling pattern" of recanting his "key pronouncements."

The model that Israely puts forward is of a pope whose speeches provoke resistance and must be corrected later by more level-headed Vatican diplomats. Israely categorizes the trouble with Benedict's speeches like this:

Israely makes a contradictory assertion that the pope's courting of controversy is both "blatant" and "inadvertent." In Israely's language, a thing can be defiantly clamorous and negligently heedless at the same time. This kind of lapse in logic is common today when rhetorical bluster is more important than consistency and when opposite ideas can co-exist without the author's having any sense of the contradiction. Israely has a spin he wants to attach to Benedict's papacy, and achieving this spin outweighs considerations of rhetorical consistency.

Nevertheless, in Israely's catalog of examples, three of the five examples consist of omissions: that is, Israely faults Benedict for what he does not say. The first example of five, on the pope's decision not to call the London tube bombings "anti-Christian," is an example of a phrase that Benedict decided not to use. Israely, therefore, criticizes the pope for editing out a potential trouble spot, just as if the pope had really said it.

There's a hypersensitivity at work here, as well as a tactic of using the occasion of Benedict's speeches to push certain political views. The pretext of criticizing some perceived mistake of the pope is a veil for pushing independent agendas. Criticizing the pope's speech at Auschwitz, for instance, Rabbi David Rosen complains that Benedict didn't make "a more explicit reference to German responsibility," which is to say that although the pope spoke of German responsibility, his mention of it wasn't as "explicit" as Rosen would have liked. One gets the sense that no level of explicitness would satisfy Rosen, whose aim seems disconnected from the pope's text. In reality, Rosen's criticism is independent of Benedict's speech. Rosen is prepared to offer his criticism regardless of the pope's text.

The other items in Israely's catalog follow similar patterns. The occasions of Benedict's speeches are exploited in ways that bear little relation to the pope's intent and actual words. Israely seems to have contrived his article in the context of Cardinal Sodano's ongoing battle to retain control of the Vatican Secretariat of the State, at which office he has officially been replaced by Cardinal Bertone. Without Sodano's moderating influence, Israely implies, Benedict would be lost.