With the passing of every prominent man, ceremonial expressions of his irreplaceability abound. But we traditionalists know too well that Michael Davies is irreplaceable. With his death, we find ourselves a movement of the laity without a senior leader from among our ranks. No one I know would even presume to think himself capable of filling the man’s shoes, let alone actually trying to fill them.

The sudden absence of Michael Davies reveals just how crucial the work of this great man was to the traditionalist cause. Yes, Davies was not just an important man, but a great one. His greatness consisted not only in the stately succession of seminal writings he produced for our movement, but also - and this was just as important to his influence - a grandness of personality that projected him onto the world stage in spite of his utter lack of any pretensions about who he was. For Davies was, as we Americans say, “a regular guy.”

Traditionalists did not always unanimously agree with Michael Davies on his positions. His persistent optimism about our supposed Nicodemus friend in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for example, was hard to explain.

And it is a pity that certain neo-Catholic publications are now seizing upon these occasional and really very minor disagreements to present Davies as if he were the one “responsible” traditionalist, when these same publications did not hesitate to denounce him and even to accuse him of “schism” when it suited their purposes.

We cannot allow the man’s death to be exploited this way, for the truth is that Davies’ fundamental statements about the crisis and the illusory “schism” of the Society of St. Pius X made many of us sound very tame by comparison. One need only leaf through some of his writings to recall vividly what the neo-Catholics would like everyone to forget.

We can have good hope indeed that God has granted this great man and friend of Tradition the eternal reward we all believe he has surely earned.