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Entry: The Folk Mass is Ended... Go in Peace Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_folk_mass_is_ended_go_in_peace#31885 Post contents: <I>But in order to check it, I would have needed to slog through that 1,000-page book of conciliar documents written in 1960s Newspeak. Not even I was nerdy enough in high school to do that….</I> Good point. Only a nerd would desire to read the Documents of an Ecumenical Council that occurred during their lifetime. <I>I would later learn from reading the works of that great Catholic apologist Michael Davies that most of what our teachers and pastors told us was false...</I> Davies books mixed a LOT of personal judgment poison in with referenced citations from the very Magisterium he spent too much of his life opposing. He also made tons of factual errors. Even when Priests, like Fr. Harrison, corrected him on his errors vis a vis Religious LIierty, Davies refused to admit or correct his errors. Innumerable are those in whom he successfully sowed enmity and mistrust against the Church Jesus established. It is often truly said of him that he mid-wifed many into schism. <I> The English speaker and writer Michael Davies is now established solidly as the most influential apologist for traditionalist Catholicism in the English-speaking world. (By "traditionalist" I mean that wing of the Church which is generally critical not only of the manifold violations of official Catholic doctrine, worship and discipline which have plagued the Church since Vatican Council II, but also of the officially introduced changes themselves.) Davies has the kind of literary merits which also characterize a good lawyer: a clear and forceful style which laymen can readily understand; the ability to be polemical without lapsing into fanaticism; diligence in digging out recognized authorities who support his positions and adversaries who concede them; and the absence of that ambiguity and fuzziness, that dependence on emotive buzz-words, which so often mars the effusions of liberal dissidents.</I> <I> Nevertheless, I think he has a tendency to draw exaggerated conclusions from the data which he compiles and expounds so lucidly and persuasively. I have read - and enjoyed - most of his books, but often end up with serious reservations about his final positions. One feels a strong underlying sympathy with Davies' controlled anger as he documents the sorry tale of desolation which is the essence of much recent Church history; but mentally one often has to withhold assent from his rather sweeping conclusions. If I may be pardoned for the seeming contradiction, Davies is a straight shooter who does not always shoot quite straight. And it is precisely his shots which go slightly astray which tend to be snapped up and recycled by followers of the Society of St Pius X and other hard-line traditionalists who live and worship in a state of disobedience to the Pope and hostility to the main body of the Church.</I> http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt44.html Sent at: 2008 11 20