Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre, By Michael Davies

I have finished sharing 'the 13 Creeds of the Church', so beginning tomorrow, I shall be sharing Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre, by Michael Davies.

For those unfamiliar with Mr Davies (13 March 1936 – 25 September 2004), here is a bit of background on him. He was a British teacher and Traditionalist writer of many books about the  Church following the Second Vatican Council. From 1992 to 2004 he was the president of the international Traditionalist organisation Foederatio Internationalis Una Voce.

He was born to Cyril and Annie Davies. His father was a Welshman and a Baptist, and his mother was English and an Anglican. Davies was brought up in England but was very proud of his Welsh descent. He served as a regular soldier in the Somerset Light Infantry during the Malayan Emergency, the Suez Crisis, and the EOKA campaign in Cyprus.

He had been raised as a Baptist but converted to the Faith whilst still a student in the 1950s. Whilst initially, a supporter of the Second Vatican Council, Davies became critical of the liturgical changes that followed in its wake, which he argued were a result of distortions and misreadings of the Council's mandates for liturgical reform. He later supported Msgr Lefebvre, writing a three-volume series titled Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre in which he defended Lefebvre against accusations of disobedience and schism for refusing to celebrate the Mass of Paul VI. 

I was privileged to know Mr Davies. In 1991, he was the keynote speaker at the Catholic Voice International Conference in Chicago at which I also spoke. You can read his absolutely brilliant keynote address, The Reign of Christ the King, online at The Remnant, or you can purchase it in hard copy or for Kindle here.

I was lucky enough to be seated next to him at the opening banquet of the conference. He was an amazing man, a devout Catholic and one of the most brilliant lay theologians and liturgical scholars of the 20th century.