One is tempted to follow her own example and ascribe personal motivations to explain her turn to relentless and bitter attack on the Church. But the slew of hate-filled denunciations that her threads routinely elicits from commenters creates an environment of vitriolic anti-Catholicism. For whatever personal reasons, Rice herself simultaneously feeds off and sustains this environment.
At the same time, as Francis J. Beckwith points out, she exhibits an apparently irremediable incapacity to sustain a coherent argument. He says:
Anne Rice, I am sad to say, cannot distinguish her visceral dislike for Catholic moral theology with a sustained argument against it. Her case, which is apparently universal in scope, is no wider than a first person rant: “some Catholics are bad people, and thus I (that is, Anne Rice, famous ex-con-revert),cannot believe that what the Church claims is good is in fact good.” Does anyone with a fully functional set of cognitive faculties take such literary tourettes seriously? It would be like saying that Anne Rice is a bad novelist because she is a bad reasoner. She is indeed the latter, but the latter does not establish the former.
These sorts of distinctions are essential for clarity of thought and integrity of argument. Thus, we can only conclude that she has no interest in either.
Beckwith's comment, and mine, came in response to a frank exchange of views between Carl Olson of Insight Scoop and Anne Rice on amazon.com and Facebook. See Olson's post at http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2011/04/is-there-a-sinister-agenda-behind-the-ignatius-blogs-attack-on-me-personally-wha.html#comments where he rightly observes, among other things,
And so the critics, instead of responding to reasonable defenses by Catholics resort to innuendo and insinuation and suspicion.
Sad to see Anne Rice joining this ignoble throng.
I would imagine that Ms. Rice feels betrayed by the church that she trusted and loved. That is how I feel. And it is hard not to be angry when you realize your faith has been misplaced.
ReplyDeleteMost Catholics, I'm sure, have such feelings.
ReplyDeleteBetrayal, we know, has been part of the story of the Church on earth from the very beginning and individuals have responded differently to their own and others' betrayals - as we see with Judas and Peter.
But that is the institution God founded to be his Body on earth and one does not build or rebuild it by adding one's own betrayal to the story.
Catholicism and indeed all of the various "Christian" sects need to be forcibly exterminated from the face of the earth. More blood has been shed by this religion than any other. I'm thinking if Jesus was real, which I highly doubt, he would be shamed with how you fools have twisted his words.
ReplyDeleteSo you want to exterminate a third of the world's population - but without spilling blood? Hmm. Or do you mean to say what is true, that Christianity has suffered more martyrs than any other religion, and still does?
ReplyDeleteAs for shedding blood, all the religions of the world combined cannot compare with the blood shed by anti-Christians in the last century, the high point of secularism and anti-religious violence - by Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot et al.
I fear that Anne Rice's incapacity for rational thought, or distinguishing rant from reason or evidence, is contagious.