Recently there has been a lot of news about author Anne Rice’s decision to quit Christianity while still professing a belief in Christ.
Anne Rice started as a believing Catholic; then she quit the Church; then she rejoined the Church; now she has quit again. All of this is as amusing as it is sad, and would be of no interest to the Catholic League save for her parting shots at Catholicism.
Rice claimed that the “last straw” for her was when the American bishops opposed homosexual marriage. She offered, “I didn’t anticipate in the beginning that U.S. Catholic Bishops were going to come out against same-sex marriage.” Did she actually think they would be silent on one of the most contentious moral issues of our day? Or did she think that they were silently cheering for gay marriage all along?
She also said, “I refuse to be anti-gay,” thereby separating herself from all those awful Catholic bigots. But when she was asked two years ago on ABC-TV whether the Catholic Church condemns her gay son to hell, she said, “I don’t think anybody in my church would say that. I think our view is far more compassionate.”
In an August interview on the “Joy Behar Show,” Rice said, “I myself am anti-abortion.” It didn’t take long before the pro-abortion and anti-Catholic Behar snapped, “You would deny other women the choice to have an abortion?” To which Rice said, “I would not deny them the choice.” Yet in the same breath she added, “I do think it’s the taking of a human life.”
When asked by ABC-TV’s “Nightline” about our criticism of her, Rice did not defend herself; rather she simply stated that she was “familiar with Bill Donohue and the Catholic League.”
Rice came back to the Catholic Church in the 1990s, but only recently did she learn that the bishops are not fond of gays marrying. She said in 2008 that Catholicism is not anti-gay, but in 2010 it was so anti-gay she had to quit. She is pro-life, knows abortion kills, but sides with the agenda of Planned Parenthood. She wants Christ without the Christianity.
This is more than an odyssey—it’s a tragedy.
