I want to highlight this:
“The key issue with the lifting of the excommunications is to take all possible measures to prevent these prelates from conferring the episcopacy on a new generation of Lefebvrites. No new bishops and the thing dies.”
I don’t think Benedict wants the “thing” to die” in terms of the spirituality and devotion of people associated with SSPX, but he certainly wants them reintegrated into the Church.  But the more I think about it, it seems as if lifting the excommunications is, looking at things politically, a means of actually getting more control over the SSPX, just for the reason – as well as the ordination of priests – that this commenter expresses.
As long as they were completely *out* there were no grounds to object or exert any control. But now that the bishops are back “in” in this very limited sense, their own actions are much more constrained, if they indeed want to be fully reunited.
What do you think?
Ed Peters with some more canonist views. The SSPX view, even stated in their most recent materials, is that the excommunications were null. He responds:

While we await the L’Osservatore Romano article that is to offer an account of how Pope Benedict XVI arrived at the decision to lift the excommunication imposed on the four priests who received episcopal orders illicitly (c. 1382) from Abp. Marcel Lefebvre in 1988, the materials now coming from the Society of St. Pius X continue, in my opinion, to add to the burden such an article must carry if the remission is to make sense to otherwise well-disposed outside observers.
In the meantime, for the benefit of those who would like to see some responses to the canonical arguments by which the SSPX claims that the 1988 excommunications were never incurred in first place, let me very briefly note the following:
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