Remnant Website Update: The new and improved Remnant website is due to launch Monday, December 23, 2013. Thanks for your patience. MJM
Old Memes Die Hard
By Nathan Metzger
Nothing speaks quite to the power of delusion’s ability to fight reality, than Hollywood’s portrayal of the Church. On television and in the movies, the Catholic parish is inevitably cast as an imposing, cold, gothic venue, with marble floors and a high altar. It is filled with dark paintings and haunting statues that stare knowingly at our movie’s star, who has wandered into this judging, incensed place at a moment of crisis (his own, ironically). From the loft streams the effervescent sound of Gregorian chant (at all hours of the day, apparently), and there are grated confessionals, manned perpetually by reprimanding priests, for our hero to visit. Or perhaps our movie’s star merely sits vexed and confused in a pew, disheveled from the elements and the events of the movie’s narrative, staring longingly at the towering crucifix above the altar, waiting to be greeted with a ‘my son’, and perhaps then chastised, by a serious, cassocked priest strolling past.
The Remnant Website
The Remnant’s website has seriously malfunctioned over the past week or so. We can update the site but only via means similar to those used by hackers. Very cumbersome! Our site has been around for a long time, having been established in 1996 on the then avant-garde software, FrontPage.
Of course, FrontPage is now a dinosaur, whose extinct extensions are no longer supported by most web hosting companies. Last week those extensions finally gave out completely.
The good news is that our new website is scheduled to be launched in a few days. I’m convinced visitors will agree that it was well worth the wait, since it will be much more interactive and will provide a full range of comments options and social network sharing. The new site will also provide considerably more exclusive content on a weekly basis, as well as serve as the gateway to the new Remnant blog and Remnant TV.
The Latest Issue of The Remnant is in the Mail
The latest print edition of The Remnant is now in the mail. It’s a double issue and includes groundbreaking articles on the pontificate of Pope Francis by Peter Crenshaw, Michael Matt, Christopher Ferrara, Dr. John Rao, Brian McCall, Tim Cullen and Father Michael Rodriguez. Quo Vadis, Franciscus is the title of Chris Ferrara’s powerful new study of the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, but it is the general theme of this entire issue of The Remnant.
Please consider subscribing to The Remnant’s E-Edition so you can access these important articles right away, as well the many other excellent works in this our mega-issue of 2013. http://remnant.mn.newsmemory.com/
Thank You
Thanks again for your patience as we prepare to launch the new Remnant website. We’re almost there. Please visit us on Facebook to keep up on our progress in expanding the entire Remnant operation. https://www.facebook.com/TheRemnantNewspaper?ref=hl
A New Article
In the meantime here’s another fine article by our newest columnist, Nate Metzger, to help “tide you over” until we get back up and running.
In Christo Rege,
Michael J. Matt
Ordinary Time, Ordinary Ministers, Ordinary Everything By Nate Metzger
I’ve written previously of my anti-climactic conversion from Lutheranism, and I don’t want to bore the good readers of this magazine by opining at length over an issue that is merely testimonial in nature. But allow me the indulgence to speak of this one last time.
Confessional Lutherans who convert to Catholicism are a peculiar lot. We are in the rare position, among converts, of knowing quite well what Catholics actually teach, long before converting. Certainly, I was under some slight misapprehensions, but my coming to the Church was not a matter of discovering that the picture of Catholicism I had been taught by my teachers and pastors growing up was full of gross exaggerations, outrageous mischaracterizations, and outright falsehoods. In catechism class, we read the Baltimore Catechism and looked at the Tridentine Mass. It is not uncommon to find a confessional Lutheran kid, attending his parish school, who knows more about Catholicism than the kid at the Catholic school down the road. In fact, these days, that’s what one should expect.
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