I wanted to speak to the controversy over Father Edmund Waldstein’s removal from teaching. In 2023, I published a book criticizing integralism, All the Kingdoms of the World. I discuss Father Waldstein’s positions in it. I even describe his role in the integralist movement. I had the occasion to speak with him and gained a great deal from it. While researching, I read some of his spiritual writings, from which I profited. I, of course, disagree with his positions so strongly that I wrote an entire book against them. Indeed, I hoped to defend him. He has been removed from teaching, apparently over his writing on the punishment of heretics, and it seemed to me like a standard case of academic persecution. However, the more I research it, the more complicated the rector’s discipline looks. Father Waldstein appears to have been given several opportunities to address the charges against him, and while the scope of the sanction seems to outrun anything publicly documented, he was judged on work that has not been made public. The detail that matters most is that Klausnitzer, the rector who imposed the sanction, co-signed a January 2026 statement defending Waldstein against the charge of extremism, alongside the abbot. He nonetheless removed him seven months later. I don’t know what explains the interval, but this is subtler than persecution, whatever it is. I am in no position to judge it, and so I am in no position to condemn the removal. In my interactions with Father Waldstein, I see no reason to think that he's not a wonderful, even gifted teacher, but I think it would be irresponsible for me to render any verdict.