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Walking Away

by Kathryn Jean Lopez 

Novelist Anne Rice recently announced – Sarah Palin-style, via Facebook – that she is no longer Christian. She wants to follow Christ, but to be free of other Christians who betray Him in all the ways we do. She wants to follow Christ but not be a part of a Eucharistic Church that, like and through Christ, is called to be a moral teacher, voice and model in the cultural crises of the day.  It’s all a bit of a mess, as she notes. But it’s life here for men and women not of this world.  And now she looks to do it without the sacramental tools that make it a successful eternal venture.

Rice re-embraced the Catholicism of her youth a dozen years ago. She would do so publicly, because it involved her work: No longer would she be writing about a genderless vampire. No longer would her writing represent her search. She found what she was looking for, and it was Christ.

She subsequently wrote “a spiritual confession,” in which we see not only her passion for her new found faith but also her caveats and hesitations and temptations. Among other things, she dismissed “conservative churches” as having a “contemporary obsession with sex and gender,” along  with “reproductive rights.” She’s admitted that she “hadn’t thought it radical to suggest that all churches would soon be more accepting of unconventional behavior involving sex.” She viewed Catholic teachings on these issues as contemporary politics getting in the way of her Bible reading and what is truly of Christ.

Foreshadowing her announcement last week, she wrote in her 2008 book Called Out of Darkness that “though I am again and again confronted with the political problems of organized religion, I strive mightily to ignore them.”

These views would be a cross to bear in the most private of circumstances. Now imagine hers.

I don’t envy Anne Rice. Her spiritual life is an open book, literally. When you stand in front of people and say “I’m Catholic,” consciously or not, you are inviting all kinds of reaction. In some people’s minds, you now represent an alcoholic parent who wasn’t all that Christian in his worst moments. In another’s mind, you now have to answer for the fourth-grade teacher who berated him about something that was a big misunderstanding. In one reader’s mind, you are now embracing someone who deeply wronged him. In all sorts of minds, you have to answer for every news story about the Church and sexual abuse. And all the more so if you are in public life.

You can see this pretty clearly if you follow Rice’s Facebook page, and I suspect that doesn’t even begin to tell the story of the anger and confusion and accusations that flood her inbox.

In one entry earlier this year, Rice begins beautifully: “I go to Mass for the Lord. I go for the Eucharist, to pray with others, to honor the Lord's Day, to give my sins and my doubts and my fears to God. But I won’t lie for the Catholic Church to anyone. I cannot silence my conscience. I cannot give up my conscience, and I will not.”

Lie? Christ certainly does not ask for that. Nor does His Church.

During Lent she wrote:

I went to the Palm Sunday Vigil Mass this evening, with 1600 hundred people packed into the church. We read Our Lord’s Passion according to the Gospel of Luke. It was a beautiful experience; no politics, no word of the scandal; just Catholics together, receiving the Eucharist, saying the Lord’s Prayer. Would that the world were always so distant.”

Anne Rice, in her interviews about her qualified exit following her qualified entrance, is open. On Joy Behar’s cable show she announced that “anger was building up . . . confusion was building up” as she watched Christians not reflecting their namesake. Facing “considerable discomfort,” she decided she would “prefer to walk away” than have to deal with them.

This echoed her quitting-time notice, in which she wrote:

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 outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

Yet to avoid quarrels, hostilities, disputes, one would have to quit a whole lot more than Christianity. Like families. And friendships. And politics. And publishing! And life. I hope she quits none of these. Just as I pray she gives Christianity and the Catholic Church another try.

She followed up with another list:

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.”

Her list exposes some of the sources of her anger and confusion and discomfort. She has settled into a view of the Catholic Church through the prism of the New York Times. If what I knew about the Catholic Church came from Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof and Laurie Goodstein and much of the rest of the crew there, I might bolt too.

I only know what I read in Rice’s own words, but she must feel like she is covering up for misogyny and perverse rules, if she believes we’re anti-women and doesn’t see the beauty of the natural moral law Catholic sexual teaching. It’s quite plausible Pope John Paul II on the genius of the feminine was never compellingly presented to her. It’s quite possible that the theology of the body is as exotic to her as vampire novels are to me. Goodness knows I didn’t learn about some of the most countercultural treasures of our faith in any classroom at the Catholic college I attended; I could have easily walked out with the same warped view of Catholicism Maureen Dowd, who attended the same school, seems to have.

There are, of course, hypocrites among us Christians. There always will be and most if not all of us are during the course of our lives--even today. We should, in fact, take Rice’s struggle as a challenge to work harder to always let Christ work through us and always ask for his redemptive mercy when we do not. But there’s more to her exit, and this may truly be at the heart of her problem with the Catholic Church.

Every sin is a scandal, as Rice has testified, and every scandal impresses upon the soul the need for its own purity of heart and complete surrender to our Lord.  Yet one cannot do that without the graces of the sacraments. Not if one truly believes in transubstantiation. Not if one truly believes the sacraments are real.  Not if one truly reads the Bible and the Catechism and is truly open to what the Catholic Church is. It’s a continual journey, but if you hand Him your will, daily, there’s nothing better. And there’s nothing more enduring.

Anne Rice has a love for the Eucharist. She wants unity with Christ. But she wants to do it without the Church, without the Church engaging the culture with truth and love, unless it takes on the views she wants it to. It’s a danger we can all succumb to. It’s a danger we probably all do. I pray Anne Rice will join so many of us on her knees in front of a tabernacle, the most powerful place on earth, before too long, offering Him all the anger, and confusion, and discomfort. For only He can transform it.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist. 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)