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The
Last
Letter
from
Michael J.
Matt
Editor,
The Remnant
Thirty-three years ago this
past June, Michael Davies submitted his first article for publication in these
columns. I was five years old at the time.
I don’t remember when he wasn’t a vital part of The Remnant family. For well over three decades his “Letter
from
After waging a two-year
battle against cancer, Michael Davies, who was born in 1936, suffered a massive
heart attack and died in his home on September 25, 2004. His final “Letter from
Remembering a Great
Man
Over the decades since the
close of Vatican II, Michael Davies literally gave his life to the Traditional
Catholic counterrevolution. In
fact, I wonder if the cancer that consumed his body and the disease that finally
stilled his generous heart, weren’t in some measure brought on by a grueling
writing and speaking schedule that would have severely taxed a man half his age.
We’ll never know, but what we can be sure of is that he emptied himself
completely in service of the Church, and he died in the saddle with his boots
on. We also know that he labored for a pittance from the beginning, having
consistently refused to accept a regular stipend for his column. This was hardly
out of the ordinary for Michael Davies.
In fact, his entire body of work—including twenty full length books,
dozens of pamphlets, hundreds of articles, and countless lectures—was, for the
most part, a labor of love…love for the Church to which he’d converted, and love
for the cause of Tradition that he’d made his own. He sought neither money nor fame for his
Herculean efforts to defend the Bride of Christ. Like the noble knight that he was, he
placed his sword—that most able pen—faithfully in Her
service until the very end. For him, the battle for Tradition had nothing to do
with temporal reward.
First and foremost, at
least in his mind, Michael Davies was a grade school teacher. Teaching was his first love and that
remained his identity even years after he’d retired from it in 1992. In fact, his last “Letter from
In a day and age when
credentials and degrees and inflated titles define us more than virtue does, it
says so much about Michael Davies that he wished the world to know, simply, that
he was a teacher of children.
When I was ten years old I
met him for the first time. The
memory of that meeting is a bit hazy, of course, but I recall thinking that
Welshmen sure “talk funny.” But, he
not only talked funny, he was
funny—hilariously so. Imagine our
surprise as children when we learned that the “serious Englishman” (a dual
inaccuracy at which he, being Welsh and merely raised in England, would twice wince)
whom we knew only through the solemn accolades expressed by the adults in our
lives was, in fact, one of the most entertaining men we’d ever met.
Even a child could see that
Michael Davies was a man who didn’t take himself nearly as seriously as those
around him did. His self deprecating humor, in fact, would become one of his
most endearing characteristics. Later on, it became a source of amusement to see
him flat out refuse to take fans and critics alike as seriously as they took
themselves, or, for that matter, as seriously as they took him. Especially here in
I don’t know what it was
exactly (perhaps gallows humor) but pioneer traditionalists all understood the
essential value of humor—my father, Dr. Bill Marra, Hamish Fraser, Father
Miceli, Father Urban Snyder, John Senior, even Archbishop Lefebvre himself, and,
of course, Michael Davies. I can
remember as a child lying under the piano bench (my favorite “hide out” in those
years) in the family living room and listening to them make one sobering
observation after another concerning the desperate state of the Church in the
immediate aftermath of the Council, and then move seamlessly on to some droll
commentary on Bugnini, Montini, Casaroli, Weakland or Hunthausen, which
inevitably left everyone in the room in stitches.
What fascinating men they
were! Children could hardly help
but to adore them. For us, they
were giants who lived in faraway lands and spent every waking moment dueling
with the enemies of the Church.
They brought Campion and Fisher and More to
life before our eyes. They were on
fire with love for the Catholic Church, but, and what some tend to forget, they
were all so very human—they loved life and knew how to laugh, especially at
themselves. This was true of all of them, but especially Michael Davies. As a
child, I practically worshipped him; as an adult and despite occasional
disagreements, I respected him more than any other man, save my own father; and
now in death I mourn him as I’ve never mourned anyone since my father.
What I keep thinking about
now that he’s gone is how much less interesting the world will be without
Michael Davies. He was, after all,
a sort of man for all seasons in his own right. An accomplished linguist (he spoke
several languages fluently), he also loved football and dogs and rugby and
movies; he had a fascinating appreciation for history, wars, kings and
generals. And he never met an
underdog he didn’t like. He knew
more about the War Between the States, for example, than most Americans. I can
remember walking along to Chartres one year and
listening as he expertly distracted the pilgrims from their pain and exhaustion
by explaining why General Robert E. Lee (whom he admired) had lost at
Gettysburg— this to the delight of the young pilgrims especially, who learned
more about the Civil War that afternoon than they had in years of history
classes.
Like most combat soldiers, Michael very
rarely spoke of his own military experiences in the Somerset Light Infantry
(where he’d fought in the Malayan emergency, the Suez Crisis, and the campaign
in Cyprus), apart from admitting that his years in uniform were his
happiest. But he never tired of
talking about the exploits of other soldiers, especially famous dead ones…and,
sometimes, not so famous ones. There was one story that he liked to tell: One
dark night during the War, a German airman suddenly showed up at the back door
of his mother’s kitchen, having parachuted quite by accident into her
garden. “Being British, what do you
suppose my mother did?” Michael would ask with that inimitable twinkle in his
eye. “She invited the man in for a
cup of tea and then phoned the police and asked them to come ‘round and pack him
up.” In appreciation for the tea,
the airman had given little Michael one of his battle medals which, to Michael’s
great chagrin, the police “confiscated” when they did finally “come
‘round.”
He loved war songs and
would delight in reciting poems from memory about gallant heroes and famous
battles, his favorite being Henry V’s speech before the Battle of
Agincourt (on St. Crispin’s Day). If you wanted to know how many French
vs. English died in that battle, you only needed to ask. The exact dates and figures were all
right there in that keen mind, but he would reel them off in such a way that no
one could mistake his purpose: He
was genuinely amazed by the lopsided statistics of the famous battle and just
naturally assumed that his friends would want to know them. He didn’t know how to brag, and so he
shared his wealth of such knowledge like a child might, with a kind of simple
wonder that made everyone listening feel like something new had just then been
discovered. Though few could keep
up with him intellectually, he made sure that no one ever felt inadequate around
him or because of him. Thus, bus
drivers, waiters, cabbies and bar tenders were treated like kings. Michael
Davies, the Lion of Traditionalism, was an incredibly sensitive man who
appreciated very much the little things in life.
I can remember watching the
changing of the guard with him at
Whether the topic was
Victor and Veronica Viper hissing in Mrs. Potts’ pit, or the nuances of the
rules of rugby, or Peter Pan vs. Winnie the Pooh, or single malt Scotch vs.
blended, or the suppression of the Jesuits, or Pope Paul’s liturgical
abomination—Michael Davies was in his element. He also possessed that great gift
whereby he could connect to his intellectual inferiors in a way that left them
convinced he was utterly unaware of any disparity between them. Michael Davies—the great Hammer of the
Modernists—was a model of charity.
Since his passing,
bittersweet images keep popping up in my mind. Here he’s walking along the muddy roads
to Chartres, his Welsh flag in one hand and his rosary
in the other; there he’s inside Thomas More’s actual
prison cell, chatting with the Captain of the Guard at the Tower of London;
teaching some young men in Spain the authentic words to Annie Laurie; exploring
the Chapel of the Martyrs deep in the woods of the Vendee; cheering on Wales in
a televised rugby match in some pub in the South of France; standing beneath
Michelangelo’s dome beside the tomb of St. Pius X; arranging a Tridentine Mass inside Canterbury Cathedral for the first
time since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I; praying the rosary in Fatima;
entering the miraculous waters in Lourdes; kneeling in prayer at John Fisher’s
cathedral in Rochester; “supporting the Monks” in a café in Monaco; meditating
before the statue of the Infant in the city of Prague— and a hundred other Catholic moments, at the
center of which is a rather ordinary-looking Welshman in a Jack Daniels
sweatshirt or a Pittsburgh Steelers cap.
In these rapidly fading
recollections from years gone by, I see Michael Davies teaching…constantly
teaching. During the time spent
with him in
Michael Davies was a
natural-born teacher who possessed that unique quality that instructs without
condescending, that enlightens without intimidating, and that could impart
wisdom in the brief time it takes to raise a glass in a toast. I wasn’t his peer…few men were; but I
was his student.
Conclusion
A few hours after I’d heard
the sad news of the passing of the great man, I wrote the following on The
Remnant’s web site:
Though he was not martyred,
the name Davies can surely and without hesitation be placed alongside those of
More, Fisher and Campion, as men who gave their lives
to the defense of the Holy, Roman Catholic Church in times of unparalleled
attack.
With all my heart I believe
this to be true and am convinced that history will concur. In terms of sheer
positive impact on souls languishing in a revolution-wracked Church, I can think
of no layman who served more loyally or confirmed the brethren more steadfastly.
He knew history and he understood the perils of our own time in the context of
history. He also knew that we are
presently engaged in a pitched battle against forces of darkness, against which,
humanly speaking, we are no match since the Catholic Church has fallen. He knew well that, under such
circumstances, even the strongest faith will wither if hope is lost. And so his tireless task was to keep
Hope alive, convinced that a childlike confidence in a good God is the best
antidote for the poisons of despair, ambition, presumption and pride that hell
has injected into the bloodstream of the modern world.
Like Newman and Chesterton
before him, Michael Davies chose this Faith…he wasn’t born into it. And after making that choice, he, like
them, dedicated his life to the unflagging defense of its every doctrine and
dogma, tenet and creed, rubric and sacred prayer. And this is what we’d do well to always
remember about him—he chose to be a
traditional Catholic and would have died for that choice. The former Anglican knew well that Roman
Catholics possess the pearl of great price; ours was the religion that
successfully carried saints and kings, gentlemen and scholars, soldiers and
peasants through this vale of tears for two thousand years since Christ walked
with men. We, then, are the fortunate ones…and neither fabricated liturgies nor
cockamamie Councils can change that triumphant reality. We have no excuse to
abandon Hope!
And so, as Michael always sought to be
useful, let’s put his memory to good use.
Let’s remember him happily as the mighty lion of Tradition, the jovial
son of
Cheers, Sir. Thanks for everything! And,
don’t worry—we’ll not forget what you’ve done for us and for our children. As Harry the King might have said, your
story shall the good man teach his son. And Tradition shall ne'er go by from
this day to the ending of the world.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine
upon him. May his
soul and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace,
Amen.
An Afterword
In
Defense
Even in the few days that
have elapsed since his passing, I’ve already seen a variety of published attacks
on the memory of Michael Davies, one individual even having had the remarkably
bad taste to refer to him as a member of the “unfaithful departed”.
The facts are these: No
layman writing in any language did more to alert Catholics to the severity of
the post-conciliar debacle and to the necessity of
resisting Vatican II’s ecumenism and disastrous
“renewal”; his trilogy (Pope John’s
Council, Pope Paul’s New Mass, and Cranmer’s Godly
Order) was the vehicle for the return to traditional Catholicism of
thousands of laymen, hundreds of priests and even a bishop or two. The pontificates of the post-conciliar popes were for him a source of profound sadness
and deepest regret. He believed and
he wrote and he said that the new theology, the new liturgy and the new
ecumenism were razing the human element of the Catholic Church to the ground—a
stark reality which prompted him to adamantly oppose the “conservative”
Catholicism which irrationally defended the Council’s regime of novelty for more
than thirty years!
True, he didn’t make it his
habit to join in reckless bellowing of rash judgments and dangerous opinions
that could easily lead to scandal or to simple Catholics questioning the
indefectibility of the Church. He
also had a keen sense of the awesome responsibility a Catholic writer must live
up to, especially one who dares to use his pen to question the successors of the Apostles. For the good of souls, Michael tended to
understate rather than overstate.
But this was no crime. This
was the stock and trade of a British scholar and polemicist!
How shocking it is, then,
to see American “traditionalists”—men and women who owe Michael Davies so
much—actually disparaging the memory of the great defender of Archbishop
Lefebvre, the layman who wrote the book on the problems with Pope Paul’s Mass,
and the columnist who held up the mastheads of the Angelus and The Remnant through decades of
revolution. While Michael himself would have been the last to take note of such
boorish behavior (let alone defend himself against it), I believe it’s incumbent upon those who knew him best to put a few
words down in his defense for posterity’s sake.
Remnant readers will recall that
Michael Davies and I had our differences of opinion over the years (the fact
that he tolerated any objections whatsoever raised by an editor half his age
whom he’d first encountered tagging after “mummy”, should speak to the humility
of the man). I have no desire
to tinker with any aspect of his long association with The Remnant, including those instances
when we didn’t see eye-to-eye. I
make no secret of the fact, for example, that I questioned (and still question)
Michael’s dogged defense of Cardinal Ratzinger. Over
the years and to Michael’s dismay, I published criticisms of some of the
Cardinal’s more perplexing statements. But I can also assure the reader that
there was much more to that story.
As someone who took issue with him on this very point, I hasten to set
the record straight—Michael Davies, through it all, had only the best interest
of traditional Catholics at heart. And here’s what I mean: He firmly believed (and had been assured
on numerous occasions) that Cardinal Ratzinger is “on
our side” and would do all in his power, short of touching off a schism in Rome,
to gradually turn things in Tradition’s favor. All His Eminence required of us was
patience and time.
Some of us were (and are)
skeptical. But, as Michael saw it,
the Cardinal had demonstrated enough good will on our behalf to justify our
giving him the benefit of the doubt, i.e., the Cardinal’s foreword to Msgr.
Gamber’s book; the Cardinal’s historic rehabilitation
of Pat Morely and the Honolulu Six who had been placed
under interdict for “formal adherence” to the SSPX; the Cardinal’s public
celebration of the Tridentine Mass on occasion; the
Cardinal’s willingness to meet personally with traditionalists,
etc.
Whether we can bring
ourselves to accept the Cardinal’s assurances that he is “on our side” is not at
issue. What is at issue is that Michael believed
that the Cardinal believed he was our
ally. His great “sin”, then, was to
take his friend, the Cardinal, at his word; but this was very much the British
thing to do. There was no
conspiracy or dark and dastardly plotting going on behind the scenes. Michael simply believed, based on private meetings with His Eminence (to
which none of us was privy, by the way), that the Cardinal would prove an
invaluable ally to us all. What of it?
Wouldn’t it be grand!
In the grand scheme of
things as well as in the light of eternity, this can hardly be deemed an
unforgivable offense. And, after
all Michael Davies did for his fellow Catholics and the restoration of the old
Mass throughout the world, it is absurd to suggest that his loyalty to the
Cardinal could in any way undermine his place in history as the great defender
of Tradition during the aftermath of Vatican II.
And, besides, who among us
would balk at the prospect of facing the Divine Judge knowing that the most
serious charge that could be leveled against us in life was that we had harbored
an inordinate loyalty to the head of the Holy Office?
Furthermore, to anyone who
was paying attention, it was obvious that Michael Davies had a “back-up
plan”. Never once did he cease
writing for the most “radical rag” in all of Traditionalism—The Remnant—even after we’d published “We
Resist You the Face”, which Michael suggested I send to every bishop in the
Michael Davies’ loyal stand
with The Remnant infuriated those
centrists who preach a “reasonable” and “balanced” traditionalism (based
primarily on liturgical “preferences”) and who believed that his alliance with
such dangerous “extremists” as us was detrimental to Una Voce’s prestige here and
abroad. But he paid little attention to this. Instead, he labored to strike a balance
that he hoped would, in the long run, benefit the greatest number of abandoned
traditional Catholics and their children. He worked diligently in the present
but never took his eye off the future.
To the further
consternation of his “reasonable” friends, he consistently supported the Society
of St. Pius X, insisting publicly that attendance at SSPX Masses was permissible
and that the SSPX could not be considered schismatic. He maintained close relations with many
if not most of the priests of the SSPX. And, back in January of 2004, I myself
drove him from
One of Michael’s last
published letters was to Father Patrick Perez in which he encouraged Catholics
in
How do you suppose that one
went over in
In
the Conciliar Church today there is one, and just one,
absolute, and this is, to repeat the words of Pope John Paul II, that the little
seed planted by Pope John XXIII has become “a tree which has spread its majestic
and mighty branches over the vineyard of the Lord”, and that “it has given us
many fruits in these 35 years of life, and it will give us many more in the
years to come.” I cannot imagine
any bishop in the world, no matter how orthodox in his personal belief, no
matter how generous to traditional Catholics in authorising the Missal of St.
Pius V, who would have the courage to dissent from the insistence of Cardinal
Basil Hume that there must be no turning back from the policies they had adopted
to implement the Council. We are witnessing not the renewal but the “accelerated
decomposition of Catholicism”, our bishops, beginning with the bishop of
Michael maintained good
relations with the Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of the Christ the King
and the other approved priestly orders.
He believed in at least trying, again, for the sake of the souls of the
faithful, to bring traditionalists closer together in order to help each other
weather this post-conciliar storm. And yet, lest anyone mistake that effort
for the swapping of principle for a tenuous unity, let us remember that Michael
Davies, to the bitter end, remained a fierce critic of the New Mass, which he
refused to attend and which he considered an abomination; he lambasted Vatican II for the reign of
terror that it had imposed on the Church; and he frequently stated in public
that, thanks to Vatican II, the New Mass and the disastrous current pontificate,
the Church today is well beyond crisis and, humanly speaking, well beyond hope…
Little
things? Yes, if your only forum is some lame
website in cyberspace. But for a
high-profile traditional Catholic, the president of an international federation,
a renowned international author, and one who was regularly granted private
audiences with some of the highest ranking prelates in the Church (despite his
Remnant by-line)—those “little
things” spoke volumes.
Michael Davies was a man
who demonstrated that leadership involves knowing when to advance as well as
when to hold the ground. And hold
his ground he did, even while extremist traditionalists rushed past him, leering
at him and mocking his “centrism”, just before they overran the front line and
rushed straight off the battlefield into the fever swamps of
irrelevancy—precisely where the Modernist revolutionaries wanted all Traditional
Catholics to wind up… out of the Church and well out of their
way.
Neo-Catholics, envious of
his accomplishments in favor of a cause they’d declared “dead and buried”
decades ago, will no doubt try to turn Michael Davies against the movement he
championed; the tiny fringe of fever-swamp traditionalists will try to condemn
him for failing to come down with the fever and start his own church or crown
himself pope; but the vast majority of Traditional Catholics know exactly where
he stood and what he did for the Church and for hundreds of thousands of
souls.
These little jabs by little
men will be forgotten soon enough.
History knows the truth about Michael Davies, and so do we. And we will not
forget.
End
Note
Any one who is fortunate
enough to be worshipping regularly at the Tridentine
Mass these days may see fit to consider that, were it not for the groundwork of
Michael Davies, there may not be many such Masses left to attend anywhere in the
world. Would it not be right and
fitting, then, for each of us to vow here and now to have one such Mass offered
for the repose of his soul? I can
think of no more fitting way to repay the debt we owe the man who spent
thirty-five years teaching us about the “most beautiful thing this side of
heaven” and showing us all how to keep ourselves and our children on the narrow
path that leads to everlasting life…despite the Revolution of Vatican
II.
Michael’s funeral will be
held at 11:00 on Friday, October 22nd at St. Mary’s Church,