Michael J. Matt | Editor
I’ve never been a fan of the late Robin Williams. If I wanted Jonathan Winters I’d watch Jonathan Winters. That is not his fault, of course-- I just never got his humor. In fact, I remember feeling sorry for him the few times I saw him interviewed on TV. To me he seemed paralyzingly insecure, as though he suffered from some debilitating need to be accepted at every moment because he lived in constant fear that, for him, acceptance was always temporary. The incessant conversational jokes, harmless little cries for help, always to be met with howls of laughter, made me feel sad for him. Maybe that’s what depression looks like. I don’t know. Poor man!
Whilst the murderous gate keepers of the secular asylum hunt them down to cull them in their mothers' womb, a group of nuns in France have founded the Little Sisters Disciples of the Lamb, a contemplative order made up of women with Down syndrome. This community was founded in 1985, canonically recognized as a public association by the Archbishop of Tours in 1990.
“Guided by the wisdom of St Benedict, we teach our little disabled sisters the manual labour necessary for their development. We live poverty in putting ourselves at their disposal. With them, we share the work of everyday life. The office, adoration and the praying of the rosary are adapted to their rhythm and their capacities. In a spirit of silence, our prayer feeds every day on the Eucharist and on the meditation of the Gospel.”
Since the 1980s The Remnant has been proud to publish the powerful insights and commentary of the incomparable Solange Hertz. A close friend of Remnant founder Walter L. Matt (RIP) for many years, she was with the Remnant almost from the beginning. In her own right, Mrs. Hertz came to be regarded as the matriarch of traditional Catholicism in the English-speaking world (although her writings appeared not infrequently in French, as well).
She was so far ahead of the curve in exposing the fundamental errors afflicting the modern Church and State that newcomers to the traditionalist movement sometimes fail to realize that it was Mrs. Hertz who pioneered the early and in-depth exposés of feminism, democracy gone awry, Americanism, Natural Family Planning, and the myriad attacks on Sacred Scripture by the forces of scientism. (In fact, if you’re interested in the questions of biblical inerrancy, for example, or the Galileo case, evolution and geocentrism, if is largely because Mrs. Hertz was tackling such 900-pound gorillas long before it became fashionable to do so.)