I base my definition of “traditionalist” on Michael Davies. I would guess that he would like simply to be called “Roman Catholic” –I think, to him, “Traditional Roman Catholic” would be an oxymoronic term- or just moronic, for short. Nonetheless, in these days, with so much deep pluralism amongst people calling themselves Catholic, it has become necessary to differentiate with nomers, even if they are missing something of the truth.
After the aggiornomento, or opening up to the world, of the Second Vatican Council, when Mr. Davies was a young man, the winds came into the Church and blew all the furniture about. He came into a Church that was rife with confusion and the rapidity of change, a Church ill equipped to deal with the half-life meltdown that was the Seventies. I saw a video recently of Mr. Davies from this time, on a talk show with the chameleon-like Malachi Martin as host, opposite a high-ranking American prelate. Pope John Paul II had just been elected Pope, and Mr. Davies was arguing in hope and defense of the Pope, who was considered at the least, an unknown, at the best, a ‘traditionalist’. Mr. Davies was arguing also with the American prelate about the promulgation of the Novus Ordae Missae and the perennial nature of the traditional Masses, most notably the Mass which was in use just prior to the Novus Ordae, the Tridentine Mass.
There was great hope in Mr. Davies, his young face serious yet detached, somehow, from the fray. He was unfailingly charitable in his statements, but tough- tough because he argued about present events not from his own light, but in the light of Tradition. That is, he was immersed in the Magisterial teachings, and the history of the Church he loved. It was as if he breathed in the air of Catholic culture and life, from ages past, on many different levels. He had the sensuum Catholicus, the “Catholic Sense”- it is better translated as “ a nose for things truly Catholic”- Mr. Davies was a Catholic Beagle, and I mean that seriously. How many people he alerted to the crisis in the Faith! Even then, in the late seventies, he saw the directions things would take- and I believe he was driven to study history and the Traditions to make sense of it all, and to keep his Faith. In the wake of that drive, he pulled many others to safer waters.
When I met Mr. Davies, in July 1998, he was in his late fifties, and writing his passionate book on the rising of the Vendee in revolutionary France. He was giving lectures to us, and he was in full form, great jokes, the largesse of joy one gets only from real faith in Our Lord; he was likening the rising of the Vendee, against the blasphemous proclamations of the Revolution, to those who would hold to the doctrines and traditions of the Faith in the present darkness. It was my first experience of the war taking place inside the walls of the Church, but I’d sensed it before. Mr. Davies simply cleared it up for me.
I also heard lots of discussions from his corner on a group called SSPX- I thought it sounded like some weird military term from the WWII lessons I’d not paid any attention to in high school. Then I heard the term “Sede Vacantist”- I thought they were talking about some hotel in Italian. Finally, I got curious when I noticed that there was a young seminarian who seemed anxious to talk to Mr. Davies about where to pursue his journey into the priesthood. I sensed that Mr. Davies was like a lighthouse, who not only shed light on things, but also knew the terrain like an old sea captain. Yet he was not conspiratorial or critical of the Pope, the Vatican or anyone else, in a self-serving way. He was not skeptical or critical by nature, but only in necessity, and never out of fear- rather it seemed out of genuine love for the Church. He held to the Church like a beagle to a fox, even if She were hard to find- and encouraged others to do the same.
I began to read his books, starting with I Am With You Always, an explanation of how and in what ways the Lord stays with His Church, how She remains indefectible. It was a lesson from a master teacher in the Traditional Magisterial teachings of the Church: no more, no less. It was not polemic nor a Whiner’s Handbook. It was Catholic teaching, pure and simple.
As a new Catholic, I was-and am- determined that I not become Catholic to become Protestant again, which I feared many so-called “Traditionalists” and “Liberals” had become. So I set myself, in the footsteps of Dr. William Marra, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and mainly Mr. Davies, to understand both the history and teachings of the perennial Church, and the landscape of Her present domain, from end to end. I decided that I loved the Church, like a mother (I love the term “Holy Mother Church”): for She is the ark wherein our souls are formed, where we “work out our salvation in fear and trembling”; and that to love Her is to know Her children, all of them, and then to ask the Lord to show us where He wants us to be His agents.
As a convert of only eight years, I am still a relative outsider, still learning the inexhaustible history and richness of the Church, still learning the depths in the deceptively simple term “Where is Peter, there is the Church”. Yet we must seek, in these days, to know who are those who have submitted to Christ in His Church, and those who have not; and as Michael Davies knew, as a student of history, specifically the history of the Church he loved, we shall know them by their fruits. And we shall only be able to recognize the fruits “in the light of Tradition”.
To be continued-
