Anne Rice has made waves in her declaration about leaving Christianity while retaining Christ:
For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian … 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.
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,” Rice wrote. “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.
Two things struck me:
1. Isn’t it natural to not want to be associated with “those people” who call themselves Christians, those “deservedly infamous” and petty little nincompoops? I think lots of Christians feel that way. But becoming a Christian involves realizing that, rather than being apart from and better than “those people,” you are one of “those people.”
2. The popular mantra from a few decades ago was “Jesus? Yes! The Church? No!” Anne Rice has evolved that by saying yes to Jesus and no to all of Christianity.
This idea also seems appealing: leave the historical baggage tied to “Christianity” behind and set out on your own with just Jesus. Leave the churches and the mom’s groups and the Evangelical Republicans and the hypocritcal gossipers and the charismatics and the Catholics and even the liberals and just do your own thing with Jesus.
The problem is that you, too, are a sinner in need of God’s grace, and that grace often comes through other fellow sinners. Sinners wrote the Bible and handed on divine revelation to other sinners who handed it on to other sinners who loved God and His Church so much that they gave their lives for Christ and handed it on to their children who ultimately handed it on to Anne Rice. It’s like disowning your family–you can’t get away from them because they are part of you.
Wow, this is really disappointing. I read some of her Christian novels, and she seemed to be a really faithful orthodox Catholic. I didn’t see this coming at all.
The worst thing about Christianity (or, the Church) is Christians. When one unpacks this definitionally, it becomes almost a tautology. And, as you say, that includes oneself as “the worst.”
The worst thing about Christianity is Christians; unpacked conceptually, this becomes almost a tautology. This comes as a surprise to Rice? Makes no sense…
Our Lord did not found the Church to be a club of the perfect, but a hospital for the imperfect. And it’s not so much that Ann dislikes this, but that she dislikes what the imperfect teach, thinking of them as the authors of the teachings.
How someone could who studied her way into the Church have missed that the Church is not guided by her imperfect members but by her head, Our Lord Himself, is beyond me. I can only speculate that she chose to ignore the supernatural aspect of the Church.
However, I honestly think that it’s a phase. Just like the Catholic Ann Rice took decades resiting the pull from Our Lord in His Church and spent a seemingly uncomfortable decade in it, she will come back again. As a matter of fact, I know someone whose story is made up by such conversion and reversion.
May St. Ann, mother of Our Holy Mother, pray for her.
I pray that you’re right.
On a lighter note, one could think that Anne had left the human race: “It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.”*
* From http://vereloqui.blogspot.com/