As I recall it, Joseph Ratzinger was a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Communio.
Mr. Weigel perhaps is thinking of his own critics here, as he has been described by Tracy Rowland, among others of the Communio group in this country (and elsewhere, Ms Rowland is in Australia), as a "Whig Thomist", a term applied to Weigel, Neuhaus and Novak.
One cannot suppress a grin upon recalling Dr. Johnson's aphorism that the Devil was the first Whig.
What's even funnier, Pope Benedict only had one sentence referring to America in the Christmas address Weigel cites: "It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution."
That Weigel teases out a four-sentence interpretation just to bash the Communio school is lazy, and perhaps even a bit slimy.