In today's world it may seem a little counter-intuitive for us straggling band of Anglicans to be standing on the threshold of the Catholic Church, eager for her full embrace. Haven't we heard about the clerical abuse? Are we not aware of her flaws? Well, yes, but her glories far outweigh them. And I am so thankful God has given me the grace to see. But it has taken a long time. So it is with some sadness I see that Anne Rice, who ditched her Roman Catholic background once, is ditching her Church again. She has taken the increasingly fashionable position that one can follow Jesus Christ but not be religious, not be a Christian. I beg to differ.
Anne Rice was born and brought up Catholic, then left the faith, only to return in 2005. Her Wikipedia entry says the following:
In 2005, Newsweek reported, "[Rice] came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18." Her return has not come with a full embrace of the Church's stances on social issues; Rice remains a supporter of equality for gay men and lesbians (including marriage rights), as well as abortion rights and birth control. Rice has written extensively on the matter:
Well, it seems that her dissident stance has won out. (My emphases.)
Novelist Anne Rice remains committed to Christ. But she is quitting Christianity.
The “Interview With The Vampire” author, who in recent years has spoken publicly about her faith and written a series of novels tracing the life of Jesus, wrote on her Facebook page Wednesday that she was finished with organized Christianity.
For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outside. My conscience will allow nothing else.
She followed that post a few minutes later with more details:
As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
Then she adds this:
My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been or might become.
Oh, how I remember believing like this. It was just me and Jesus, baby, and since I believed I had a direct pipeline to Him, nobody external, no church, no human being on earth, was going to tell me what to believe. So for years, I wandered as a lonely pilgrim outside the confines of organized Christianity. Consequently, I also picked up a lot of wonky beliefs, heresies that I was even rather proud of since I thought I was smarter than most people. I too, felt like an outsider, partially because I had to be so spiritually disciplined in order to even approximate normality. I thought my disciplines made me more serious as a Christian, but when I finally embraced an orthodox faith, I no longer needed to meditate so long to still the negative chatter in my head. In those days, my life was one of almost constant spiritual defeat, though thankfully, I had a deep sense that Jesus is alive and He loves me, so that kept kept hope alive and prevented me from becoming a bitter person. I have come to see that it is by believing the Truth we are sanctified, not by trying to obey the works of the law or the teachings of Jesus under our own steam. Without right doctrine, one is doomed to fail in one's Christian walk. I know from experience. Trust me and do not try this at home.
Thank God for Pastor Doug Ward at Kanata Baptist Church. I remember my first words to him. "I'm a maverick and a heretic and I've never been able to sign on the dotted line of any church," I announced, though I did tell him that I had asked Jesus to come into my heart and acknowledged Him as Lord and Savior.
"Well, maybe this church is big enough for you," he said.
How wise he was. So I entered in. I was loved and accepted and gently taught by people with a deep evangelical faith but a mission to reach out to seekers like myself. So, for the most part, some of my odd beliefs — Swedeborgianism, Christian Science, Roy Masters (I think in the end, they all kind of cancelled each other out, but that's another story — one friend described me as like someone with several large dogs on leashes all trying to pull me in different directions) were not challenged directly. Instead I was exposed to good teaching, wonderful fellowship and gradually the heresies I clutched began to lose their hold over me. I will be forever thankful for Pastor Doug and the good, good Christian brothers and sisters at Kanata Baptist Church. KBC was like the hyperbaric chamber I needed so that I would not get the spiritual "bends" I would have experienced had I entered the Anglican Catholic Church right off the bat. What? no women priests? What? people standing around repeating prayers in unison?
I feel bad for Anne Rice, because the lonely pilgrim road is a road to nowhere. It is a road of intense vulnerability to the forces of darkness because you have no spiritual covering, no protection through the hierarchy that Christ instituted. (To say nothing of the sacraments.) And now I see that that Church is the Catholic Church and I thank God I have been able to see Her with spiritual eyes and not get distracted by the very real flaws of some of her members.
The Anchoress — how I love her — writes (her emphases):
Rice’s angry frustration with what she (and, let’s face it, many others) perceive to be a sort of Institution of No is interesting. She refuses to be “anti-gay,” but the church teaches that indeed we must not be anti-gay, that homosexual inclinations are not sinful in themselves, but that all are called to chastity, whether gay or straight.
So, what she is refusing is not so much church teaching, which she incorrectly represents, but the worldly distortion of church teaching both as it is misunderstood and too-often practiced. I do not know how anyone could read the USCCB’s pastoral letter, Always Our Children and then make a credible argument that the church is “anti-gay.”
But then, I do not know how anyone can read Humanae Vitae and credibly call the church anti-feminist or anti-humanist.
I do not know how anyone can read Pope John Paul II’s exhaustive teachings on the Theology of the Body and credibly declare the church to be reactionary on issues of sexuality or womanhood.
I do not know how anyone can read Gaudium et Spes and credibly argue that the church is out of touch with the Human Person or Society.
I do not know how anyone can read Fides et ratio and credibly argue that the church does not hold human reason in esteem.
I do not know how anyone can look at the Vatican supporting and funding Stem Cell Research, or the even the briefest list of religiously-inclined scientists and researchers and credibly argue that Christianity is “anti-science.”
Anne Rice wants to do the Life-in-Christ on her own, while saying “Yes” to the worldly world and its values. She seems not to realize that far from being an Institution of No, the church is a giant and eternal urging toward “Yes,”, that being a “yes” toward God–whose ways are not our ways, and who draws all to Himself, in the fullness of time–rather than a “yes” to ourselves.
I think the "yes" to herself is in Rice's "I refuse" which she repeats as if she were chanting a litany.
This is so sad, because, having been there, done that, and gotten the T-shirt and bumper sticker, I know how fruitless that kind of trying to be Christian without being "religious" truly is. That's such a popular mantra these days.
But I must remember the approach that Pastor Doug took with me and be gentle with these seekers as he was gentle with me.
Earlier this week, I read one of my favorite passages in My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers.
If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine . . . —John 7:17The golden rule to follow to obtain spiritual understanding is not one of intellectual pursuit, but one of obedience. If a person wants scientific knowledge, then intellectual curiosity must be his guide. But if he desires knowledge and insight into the teachings of Jesus Christ, he can only obtain it through obedience. If spiritual things seem dark and hidden to me, then I can be sure that there is a point of disobedience somewhere in my life. Intellectual darkness is the result of ignorance, but spiritual darkness is the result of something that I do not intend to obey.
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The problem with Ms Rice's approach to Christ is that she may create a Christ of her own liking. That is not the worship of the Living God but a form of idolatry.
Now the Gospels tell us that Jesus was never up to anyone's liking. That's why he asked Peter.
"Who do you say I am?"
Unfortunately, despite the Anchoress' very correct listing of where the Catholic Church stands on many issues, very few people read magisterial documents, even the clergy, who are supposed to read, inwardly digest and disseminate these teachings. Most people get their info not from encyclicals but from the mass media, and the mass media, like the world in general, is operating Sous le soleil de Satan, and is not notably friendly to the goal of human salvation.
The fact that in the West Christians have duties as citizens, and that we are often put in the position of opposing new laws which would change long-settled practices and customs which were based on a Christian understanding of the person and his role in society is part of what leads outsiders, or even insiders who aren't paying sufficient attention, to see us as the "people of no"; we do say "no" to many things after all. As the Didache and Epistle to Barnabas, drawing out the implications of the straight-and-narrow and the wide-and-easy, long-ago pointed out, there is a path that leads to death and one that leads to life. Saying "yes" to the way of life involves, at least passively, saying "no" to the death-way.
Steve Cavanaugh says: "Unfortunately, despite the Anchoress' very correct listing of where the Catholic Church stands on many issues, very few people read magisterial documents, even the clergy, who are supposed to read, inwardly digest and disseminate these teachings."
Indeed.
There would have been some excuse for that back when they were available only selected libraries, but it is surprising now that all of these documents are available at a mouse click. I include myself in that, because of those documents I've read only Humanae Vitae and that was some years ago.
Human beans are strange critters.
When I hear about the church being anti-science, anti-gay, anti-woman etc… it really hits home to me the power that the mainstream media has in its ability to successfully construct an image of our church based on soundbites, half-truths, innuendo and vested interests. Based on the quotes above, Ms. Rice might as well be the mouthpiece of the London Times.
I must admit that until recently I believed that people – in general – are able to see through PR and bias. Now, I'm not so sure anymore. Is a PR disaster the only disaster worth worrying about these days?!! Taking the recent vatican norms as an example – when a headline reads 'Vatican says Women Priests = Child Abuse' is it because of anti-catholic spite or actual inability to comprehend what is contained in the document?
This misrepresentation of what the vatican says or what our faith entails does have serious consequences. It may lead people to believe that the Pope/Vatican seeks "to defend the indefensible" and "to dress up prejudice as doctrine". The reason I put these in quotation marks is because it already has!! The person I have in mind is the vicar-son of the current Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, who has written a comprehensive anti-Vatican/Pope Benedict diatribe on his blog here: http://paddyanglican.blogspot.com/2010/07/becoming-protestant-story-of-reluctant.html .
It really is shocking that his interpretation of the recently issued priestly norms leads him to associate Pope Benedict (indirectly of course) the author of 'God is Love' with those who "think that for God to Love them he must hate others".
This is what we are dealing with here – wildly inaccurate accusations made against the Catholic faith, not only by the nutters (for they will always be with us) but by those who should know better – and Ms. Rice really ought to clarify her "anti-science" "anti-life" "anti-gay" comments in order the distinguish herself from the former.
Jakian Thomist – Anti-Ecumenical! – Anti Women! – I wish it were not so but that is the message this document sends out! By publishing a more severe penalty for facilitating con-celebration of the Eucharist with Protestants or the Ordination of a woman to Holy Orders than that for molesting or raping a child the Vatican and the Pope have insulted all 3 groups. Don't defend the indefensible and incidentally there are many bishops in my own Anglican Communion who likewise treat women and those who are gay as 2nd class citizens – and indeed Anglican clergy who have defiled innocent children – I don't defend them either! Yes I am anti the Vatican and the current Pope as I see both as destroying Roman Catholicism from the inside! That grieves me as one whose priestly vocation was nurtured and encouraged by faithful and wonderful Roman Catholic religious. I am as you kindly concede not a nutter but one who should know better – Well if you want me to know better then I need to see better demonstrated to me. And incidentally what on earth does my father's office have to do with my opinion. I am myself and don't hang off anybody's coat tails!
Stephen Neill
I have to admit I too was once like Anne Rice. As a teenager I was the straight co-president of the Gay Straight Alliance at my high school with a lesbian girl. As I looked around, I saw a bunch of good kids, most of whom had suffered incredible abuse or neglect by their fathers and I wanted to love them and befriend them. I thought, because of the media and some actions by very uniformed Christians. that I couldn't be part of the church and still love homosexuals or drug addicts or gang members or the hundreds of other broken and hurt kids I saw in my inner-city school. So I swore off the Church. Thank God for Father James Smith of St. John the Evangelist Catholic parish who showed me that God was for the wounded in our society. Now I understand that the Church encourages us to love the most broken and downtrodden in our society, but that part of loving is not encouraging immoral and self-destructive behavior. (And yes homosexuality IS destructive. Of the 13 gay men in that club 11 of them now have HIV/AIDES). One of the great parts of being a seminarian in the city is working in homeless shelters or drug rehab clinics that are all run by the Church. I'm going to pray for Anne Rice that she discovers this part of the Church. (By the was 9 of those gay men who have HIV have found the Church, stopped engaging in immoral behavior and three of them are now working as lay brothers in various religious orders. Glory be to God!)
Thanks so much for sharing your experience, Robbie. There is a great deal of confusion about the Church's teaching and so seeing it in action is what is needed.
Care and compassion along with clarity of teaching is what connects people with the great community of faith, one which can help us live lives that are complete. Love speaks volumes when it is supported by clear values and behavior as compared to the facile MSM dismissal of the Great Tradition which leads people like Anne Rice into narcissism and confusion.
Then Jesus said to the twelve: Will you also go away? And Simon Peter answered him: Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known, that thou art the Christ, the Son of God. John 6:68-70
It can easily be shown that the highly organized and disciplined totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century preferred to have their Christians served as disorganized as possible. It can also be demonstrated that the highly organized and disciplined part of Christianity was not digestible for such forces. Yes, our Lord's statement "… I will build my Church" takes on added significance in view of these experiences.
The comfortable, poorly informed, and embarrassingly naive part of "spiritual but not religious" Christianity has not learned this basic lesson.
I never was a fan.
Tried to read Interview with a Vampire around the time her books were in fashion and was so creeped out by it I stopped after about 70 pages.
Someone once told me only an apostate Catholic could come up with her stuff.
There are lots of Bad Catholics – people who don't agree with the church or don't know better but don't leave and/or, if they don't practise the religion really, don't try to change the church.
She seems to know better and, unlike the legions of Bad Catholics, wants to get on a soapbox, having a go at the church to recapture those coolness points she had about 20 years ago.
The Bad Catholics are still Catholics at heart. Those of us who try to be Good Catholics say 'I have sinned'. The Modernist/crypto-Protestant, of whom she seems a shallow peer-pressure liberal version, says 'I will not serve'.
Please, keep in mind that Anne Rice has a homosexual son, which is an activist in political homosexualism -as well as a writer… I read some Christian articles by her, an she is orthodox in her scholarship (she believes in a real Ressurrection, and virginal Mary, etc…) … Her problem is mainly with homosexualism, and because of her son.
Although I haven't read her novel about Jesus, I have heard good things about it. Her basic beliefs about Christ are orthodox; thus, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Anne Rice knows too much about the Gospel to be able to follow through on her renunciation of Christianity. That said, however, she does certainly need prayer right now.
It's worth being reminded of C. S. Lewis's experience: –
http://christopherblosser.blogspot.com/2010/07/cs-lewis-on-membership-in-christian.html
This is news? People have been disagreeing with what the Catholic Church teaches (or with what they think the Catholic Church teaches) and leaving her to follow Christ on their own for 500+ years. These people are called Protestants. Ms. Rice has done little more that start yet another Protestant community. I'm calling it Annelicanism. Nothing noteworthy here.
I was rather saddened by, who was it, "the anchoress"?, who tried to defend the Church's teaching to AnnRice by using the silly John Paul 2 "theology of the body" rubbish, or our cowardly Bishops' "Always Our Children" letter, the pabulum of Gaudium et Spes, and all the rest. If "the anchoress" thought she was doing Miss Rice a favor she, unfortunately, was only making matters much worse.
The Church has always taught that one can sin by thought, word and deed, each carrying a different degree of seriousness. Christ's words about committing adultery in one's heart comes to mind here. Now our famously liberal Bishops are trying to tell those with a homosexual temptation that there is nothing wrong with that, and they are using a very interesting word to try to get around the whole matter of sinning by thought, word and deed. That word is "inclination." That is one of those weasel-words that is always used by the promoters of this unspeakable vice, as if to suggest in some vague way that one is "born" that way. Well, I don't know too many born murderers, born thieves, born adulterers or born heretics. We choose these sins, just as someone who has a perverted view of sexuality chooses to think, speak and, sadly, act on that sin. A person who would find a homosexual liason attractive has already just about reached bottom in his life and it is monstrous to suggest that there is nothing sinful about this "same-sex attraction." They do these wrteched souls no favor by telling them there is nothing wrong with these feelings and that it is only wrong if you act on them. Try that one on an alcoholic.
These are the mealy-mouthed ideas that have most certainly contributed to the homosexual infestation in the Church today.
So, yes, the Church is "anti-homosexual", as is only right and proper. If someone who chooses that horrible sin comes to confession, and tries to make a firm purpose of ammendment then he is welcomed back into God's good graces. But any priest who would sit there and tell him that he is just wonderful and normal to have a homosexual desire – but don't act on it, please! (Right.) – is harming that person. You know, this "love the sinner but hate the sin" stuff can be carried too far. And "Always Our Children" has already done serious harm to Catholic thinking about homosexuals and has in fact generated sympathy for their cause among ill-instructed Catholics. Without a doubt this horrendous document will be rightly condemned one day, when the Church regains her senses.
As will, by the way, John Paul 2's idiotic "theology of the body" (that man was seriously troubled) and, I dare say, the great "Gaudium et Spes" itself.
So please, dear priests out there, stop telling the homosexuals that they are "ok", that they are merely born that way and that just being homosexual is not a sin. Start helping them, and, I mean, really helping them. Give them some tough love. And ignore trendy nonsense like the things mentioned above. You have souls to save.
Dan, take it down a few notches. In one post you managed to slam at least one pope as well as some bishops and a few other fellow Catholics. You might not intend to come off as a pompous ass, but you did just that by acting like YOU are the one who knows better than the pope or Jesus himself. Nobody would choose to be gay anymore than you would choose to catch a cold. Homosexual inclinations are just that…the inclination to have sexual feelings toward the same sex. They are the same inclination we heterosexuals feel. I don't think there should be a distinction between fornication and gay sex…it's all a sin…who cares who you have it with…it's sinful behavior…but you don't see the yo-yo's at Westboro Baptist Church waving signs that God hates fornicators….it's all the same, and Homophobia is not Christ-like.
You are exactly the type of self-righteous Catholic that gives the 'uninformed' the idea that we are all filled with hate…and who made you the authority as to how far you can go with 'hate the sin and not the sinner'?…but i will bow out of this now because by bickering we also prove another one of Anne's points.
I will pray for you.
Dan:
There is no way to ask this delicately, so here it is – are you writing from the SSPX or sedevacantist perspective?
Mark VA, that was delicate, to a man, Dan, who is sex obsessed and may misread SSPX as SEX. Sadly there is more to it than that and the sedevacantists really boil down to this, any Pope that will not call us heretics and order us executed if we fail to recant, must be an anti-pope or otherwise invalid.
Well, look at what the bible actually says…
http://tiny.cc/r8wcs
Hey folks,
The Catholic Church's rules and teachings are NOT based on the teachings of Jesus. It's mostly based on the Old Testatment. And don't tell me I don't know my theology – 12 years of Catholic school, two years as a novice in the Sisters of Charity, and Catholic University.
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what Jesus said against homosexuality. And the excuse that he teaches chastity, then don't gays have to marry in order to have sexual relations.
And if you say that sexual relations are only for procreation – then straight couples should only have sex when the woman is in her fertile period.
Hey Sandra,
"The Catholic Church's rules and teachings are NOT based on the teachings of Jesus. It's mostly based on the Old Testatment. And don't tell me I don't know my theology – 12 years of Catholic school, two years as a novice in the Sisters of Charity, and Catholic University."
No strand of Christianity singles out "the teachings of Jesus," as opposed, say, to "the teachings of St. Paul" or "the teachings of the Old Testament" as the basis of its teachings, neither the Catholic Church nor the Orthodox Church nor the historic Protestant denominations which retain their allegiance to their Reformation-era Conferssions of Faith. Rather (in Catholic teaching) the whole "Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments," as received by and interpreted in, Catholic Tradition, are authoritative, and these certainly speak of, and condemn the practice of sodomitic vice and those who, without repentance, practice it. Also, Jesus said "whatsoever you shall bound on Earth shall be bound in Heaven and whatsoever you shall loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven," words which were addresses to the apostles (and their successors) and not to Anne Rice or yourself — so even on your own terms your assertion is without merit or cogence.
Christianity Today just published an interview with Ann Rice in which she answers the question, "Is there anything that would convince you to go back to the Church?"
"If we put God and Christ at the center of our lives, we have to go where that leads us. If that leads us from an organization or a group, we have to go. I think many of the arguments that people in churches raise are circular and dishonest when they attack a conscientious person who leaves the group. I don't expect people to agree with me, but I hope they respect my moral integrity.
I affirm my faith in Christ every time I get the chance. It's what's transformed my life. I've affirmed it over and over again. I get occasional e-mails from people who say, "How can you turn away from God?" but they just haven't Googled."
The full interview can be found at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/augustweb-only/43-21.0.html