This sad news arrived this morning from Solange Hertz’s daughter Tina.
Mother died peacefully last night after 10 PM, October 3, 2015.
She was 95 and had been through a long illness.
She was wearing her scapular and a Miraculous Medal - it was First Saturday.
My pastor had given her Extreme Unction on Friday, according to the old Rituale.
We hope to have a Tridentine / Extraordinary Form Requiem Funeral Mass in Leesburg, Virginia, in the original little church.
Réquiem aetérnam dona ea, Dómine, et lux perpétua lúceat ea.
Here is a short biography of the good woman, real lady and great writer as compiled and
written by her friend Patrick McCarthy.
Nellie Strong Hertz, aka, “Solange” Hertz to her many readers, only child of John and Andree (Laurans Strong), was born on January 1, 1920. Her father, of West Virginia Protestant stock, was an engineer who served in the U.S. Army in France during World War I. While stationed there, he met and married the Frenchwoman who would later become Solange’s mother. During childhood, “Nellie” experienced both her American and French heritages; for instance, in her schooling – many decades later, she retained fond memories of primary learning from French nuns and equally vivid recollections of her later secondary education, at the old Western High School in Washington, D.C. (today, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts).
Solange was a very precocious child with a pronounced interest in boys’, not girls’, activities. Her father taught her how to shoot a pistol and how to play a solid second base (put to later good use when raising a family of five children). When at Western High, Solange won a city-wide scholarship to attend Georgetown, which that school withdrew when it learned that she was female. Mrs. Hertz ended up, at the age of 16, entering American University instead. She double-majored in Greek and Latin but, once she finished her B.A., stopped her formal education. I once asked if she ever regretted not pursuing graduate education? “No!” (Mrs. Hertz thought that modern education, because it refuses to acknowledge basic differences in male and female characters, fails both sexes… Solange: “I spent much of my later adult life un-learning the masculine education I had received!”)
One reason Solange ended her formal studies so soon was her marriage, at the age of 19, to Gustave “Gus” Hertz. The first of their five children, Crane, was born in 1939. In that period, Gus professed no formal religion while Mrs. Hertz had lapsed from her childhood Catholicism. She had been lapsed since the age of 12, when her conscientious mother had tried to prepare her daughter for confirmation. Solange wanted to know why and, not receiving a sufficiently good answer, she refused to participate. Solange’s father, an entrenched (if lapsed) Protestant, did not care; so no sacramental confirmation took place. For many years thereafter, Mrs. Hertz simply stopped practicing the faith.
Solange remained in that a-religious state through the 1940s. She never became an atheist; rather, she searched. Additional children were born (Lydia, in 1947; Gus, in 1951; Stephen, in 1955; and, Tina, in 1960). To give the children a saner life, in 1946 the family purchased a property outside Leesburg (Loudoun County), where Solange lived until the spring of 2014, a terrible stroke forcing her into a nearby nursing home. Back in the 1950s, Loudoun was dairy country for much of the Washington area: the family itself had cows, chickens, and other animals on their beautiful property overlooking the beginning of the Blue Ridge mountains. For better and (perhaps) for worse, the Hertz children missed out on the suburbia coming to dominate our country after World War II.
With all her family responsibilities, Solange became persuaded that she needed some outlet, or, “I would go crazy.” She became a part-time writer for the old evening daily, The Washington Star, where she specialized on weekend pieces. Preparation for one of these articles, ironically suggested by an atheist editor, began her return to the faith. Assigned – in about 1951 – to investigate the Trappist monastery in Berryville, Virginia, Solange discovered that “God – not Jesus, exclusively – loved her”. For the first time in her life, this brilliant graduate of a modern university discovered the layers and layers of riches within Roman Catholic thought. The good monks in Berryville had simply shared their books with her. Given Solange’s keen intellect and supernatural grace, that was all that was needed.
Mrs. Hertz, the Catholic now on fire, could not allow her husband to continue to wallow in his quasi-paganism. Mr. Hertz initially resisted with great vigor. He told his wife, “If you do not stop this Catholic thing, I am going to leave!” Her response: “Then go!” Two things altered Gus Hertz’s mind. An avid student of history, he became persuaded of Catholicism’s truth through his reading about the incredible cultural accomplishments sponsored by the Church, pre-eminently in the 13th century (era of St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante and the Gothic cathedral). The second reason, he conceded, was: “I couldn’t take the children – day after day – praying for my conversion.”
The 1950s were a very Catholic period for the family. Oldest son Crane pursued a possible Jesuit priest’s vocation. Because of Mr. Hertz’s work (leading to employment in the State Department’s AID), the family lived abroad in places, such as the Philippines, that were very Catholic – “the most Catholic country I ever experienced”. Solange, writing every day for an hour while her younger children napped, became a popular Catholic mainstream writer. It is hard to believe, but true, that her books such as Searcher of Majesty, 1962, were actually reviewed – favorably – in the New York Times.
The 1960s shattered this world. Vatican II, which Solange heartily endorsed at its inception – “We all knew there was something wrong with the Church” – led to the unanticipated catastrophe of the conciliar Church. Mrs. Hertz, who had been such a well-regarded writer, saw her books suddenly disappear from Catholic bookstore shelves in the dawn of the “new epiphany.” She could make as little sense out of the bewildering changes to the Mass and liturgy. She and her children simultaneously encountered a staggering domestic tragedy. Gus Hertz, whose US AID job took him and his family (without Crane, who was at the seminary) to South Vietnam in the early 1960s, was captured by the Communist enemy and died in captivity in 1967. The Hertz family plight (Mr. Hertz was the first U.S. civilian abducted in the Vietnam War) made the front cover of the popular weekly, Life, in July, 1967.
Solange, not yet 50, had primary responsibility for her whole family and, simultaneously, the challenge of figuring out the nature of Catholicism in the Vatican II world. I am not sure how she provided for her family (other than that she did) but I do know that Mrs. Hertz sought out answers about the faith in the Vatican II era. She tried to find men who would explain the dramatically changed situation but: “I couldn’t find any!” That, basically, explains the origin of her later writing career. Mrs. Hertz used articles and books to try to help both herself and other bewildered Catholics to understand their dramatically altered religion.
Out of her own home during the 1960s and 70s, Solange published a series called Big Rock Papers. Her publishing operation was the simplest: single-page typed mimeographed sheets which she duplicated and mailed out herself. By word of mouth, her mailing list grew. In the 1990s, she expanded her audience, in part through publication in the Remnant newspaper. I have it on good authority that she wrote memorable pieces for that journal. For example, she took on Michael Davies about NFP (so-called Natural Family Planning) and, I am told, persuaded anyone with a reasonable mind that NFP really is disguised birth control. She believed no Catholic couples should practice it.
Also in the 1990s Solange wrote several wonderful books. Suffice it to say that those books have substantial – and, I think, enduring – value. I think three are especially helpful to fellow Catholics interested in reading her for the first time. Beyond Politics (1995) is an excellent primer on the revolutions (religious, political and scientific) which, with the conciliar Church’s capitulation, have cooperated toward today’s global spiritual collapse. It includes the essay, “Hell’s Amazing Grace”, which Dr. David Allen White has called the 20th century’s greatest single essay. The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism (1995) has helped concerned American Catholics better understand the continuing – and fatal – attachment of the American Church’s hierarchy to the “Enlightenment” principles of 1776. Whatever a Catholic’s position today should be toward our government, sacrificing the faith merely to be acceptable to the non-Catholic majority is not the way. On the strictly spiritual plane, Sin Revisited (1975, revised 1996) has been very helpful to Catholics each Lent. In this work, Mrs. Hertz revisits the insights of Eastern Catholics – the great desert monks of Egypt and Syria – so sadly lost to Western consciousness after the disastrous 1054 schism. Basically, sin as individual souls tend to experience it is the focus, not the precision and logic of Scholastic theology (thus, a child’s temptation toward gluttony is first explored, and so on).
These books – and the respectful, if limited, attention they received – doubtless formed some consolation during the difficult years of the ever-unravelling Vatican II era. Mrs. Hertz had additional personal tragedy in 1997, when she lost cherished daughter Lydia to a car crash. Her other children grew up and started families of their own – two of them, Crane (who left the Jesuits before ordination) and Gus, Jr., moving out of the immediate Washington area. Church sorrows complemented private losses, as the periodic betrayals of the faith by John-Paul II spiraled downward into the daily heresies of today’s Francis. In 2006, Solange suffered her first stroke, a debilitating blow to her in that she never fully recovered her formidable powers of memory and vocabulary. To quote her, “I can see the pool of words within me but cannot reach down and pull out the one I want.” The 2014 stroke proved even more damaging, making it impossible for her to articulate more than a word or two, to which she invariably attached the frustrated conclusion of: “blah, blah, blah”. The mind continued first-rate but the vocal apparatus daily betrayed her.
Compounding this later isolation was Mrs. Hertz’s basic forthrightness. When she was very little, her father told her: “Never lie”. Solange tried to remain true to that principle all her life, including the avoidance of trimming to maintain respectability. So, when her research persuaded her that the Bible and 17th century papal pronouncements committed the Church to the geocentric position, she said so. One loses university friends that way. A 1971 visit to Auschwitz followed by close reading of various revisionist writers persuaded Mrs. Hertz that “Bishop Williamson is right!” Catholic thinkers at all attracted to the Americanist policy of “getting along” with the intellectual status quo naturally shied away from a woman who had clearly become the proverbial “crazy aunt in the attic”.
Granted these less than positive experiences, Mrs. Hertz never felt self-pity or expected others to pity her. Increasing isolation generated no bitterness in her, far from it. She was grateful for the life God gave her, including the humbler pleasures of His bounty, such as those of the table (e.g., key-lime pie) and the bottle (e.g., vodka). She was a generous host, especially so with liquor and wide-ranging conversation. Furthermore, she was pious without being pietistic. Her life was lived during an era of a dying Church, not the time of an Innocent III or Francis of Assisi when the Mystical Body had life and spirit. It was no joy for Mrs. Hertz to be Catholic during this terrible time but she intended to persevere.
May God forgive Solange Hertz all her sins of omission and commission, for she had the burden of being a daughter of Eve. May God reward her for her steadfast faith though the Church collapsed all about her, for Solange Hertz was a true daughter of Mary.
Requiescat in pace.
Topic: Solange Hertz, RIP (Read 3984 times)