Posted on 08/03/2010 5:21:05 AM PDT by markomalley
... while continuing to build straw men and spread chaff via the MSM. The NPR site has more about Anne Rice's decision to pursue unversion (my term, not NPR's) from Christianity, specifically from the "quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group" that many of us know as the Catholic Church, which happens to have been founded by Jesus Christ, which he entrusted to his apostles and their successors, and is still standing despite the powerful Facebook salvos of the author of Interview with the Vampire:
Rice says although there were "last straws," there was no one event that caused her to reject organized religion.
"This is something that had been going on really almost from the beginning of my conversion in 1998," she says. "From the beginning, there were signs that the public face of Catholicism and the public face of Christianity were things that I found very, very difficult to accept."
Still, Rice says she tried her best to ignore the facets of Christianity she didn't support and concentrate on the ones she did. As time wore on, though — and as Rice continued to live and study as a Christian — "more and more social issues began to impinge on me," she says.
Maybe it's just me, but admitting to ignoring "facets of Christianity"—why oh why doesn't she simply say, "tenets of Catholic doctrine"?—makes it sounds as though Rice 1) wasn't willing to engage with the entirety of Church teaching, 2) was perhaps unfamiliar with basic moral teachings of the Church, 3) and wasn't willing to put her own beliefs and notions to the Truth Test.
It was very painful. But I've always been public about my beliefs, and I've always been public about wanting to make a difference. And frankly, after doing it, I felt sane for the first time in a very long while.
Rice says the final straw was when she realized the lengths that the church would go to prevent same-sex marriage.
"I didn't anticipate at the beginning that the U.S. bishops were going to come out against same-sex marriage," she says. "That they were actually going to donate money to defeat the civil rights of homosexuals in the secular society.
This is a bit of a stunner, for it suggests that Rice either didn't know what the Church teaches regarding marriage and homosexuality, or else thought, for whatever reason, that said teaching could be changed and revised, perhaps simply because she wished it to be so.
Note that Rice never, as far as I've seen over the past five years, provided any reasoning or arguments for her stances on issues such as "same sex marriage," contraception, and women's ordination. She simply assumes her position is correct and she apparently believes that clichés and emotive sound bites are all that are needed to demonstrate the validity of her position. Meanwhile, the Church has formally issued all sorts of documents about those various matters and numerous Catholic authors—both at academic and popular levels—have written articles and books explaining and defending Church teaching on these and other issues. Yet, apparently, folks should simply accept by faith Rice's statements as infallible pronouncements of objective truth. I hope she understands the reluctance many of us feel about that completely insane and illogical course of action. Finally:"... When that broke in the news, I felt an intense pressure. And I am a person who grew up with the saying that all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, and I believe that statement."
Rice says since this decision, she has a "new freedom to confess my fears, my doubts, my pain, my conflicts, my alienation," and she says she intends to take advantage of this freedom.
"You know, I don't really like disappointing all my Catholic friends," she says. "I don't really like disappointing all my Christian friends and contacts. I really don't like it. It's painful. But I did what I felt I had to do."
Luther had sola fide. Rice has sola sensus. My question still stands. "Emotions should be servants," wrote Robert Hugh Benson (himself a convert from Anglicanism), "not masters—or at least not tyrants."
Speaking of Rice:
• One Anglican priest wrote, in The Telegraph: "Rice evidently is not returning to her atheism, however. She makes it clear that she has not lost faith in Christ, only in Christianity, by which I take her to mean the Church in its organised forms. But reading what she has to say above compels me to say that she hasn’t left at all. She’s just converted to the Anglican Church. Welcome to our world, Anne." Need more be said?
• Martin Cothran had the best, get-to-the-point response to Rice's announcement.
• And Jeff Miller, the Curt Jester, keeps it short and real on Twitter: "Funny how Anne Rice's leaving the Church got so much more media coverage then her returning to the Church did."
• A Cautionary Tale: Augustine, Aquinas, and Anne Rice (July 29, 2010)
It's more integrity than Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden are ever likely to have.
Pray for her. She is confused.
Anne’s mother named her Howard Allen, and she was called by that name until she was five years old when she requested the nuns teaching kindergarten call her Anne. What kind of mother names their sweet little girl, Howard Allen? Her mother died of alcoholism when Anne was 13. Just a guess, but maybe Anne didn’t have much firm ground to stand on as a youngster. The fact they went to daily Mass as a family probably only confused her.
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