Augustine, Aquinas, and Anne Rice

Ignatius Press has an excellent blog that has recently addressed--in relation to Anne Rice--the question of attempts by Catholics to pick and choose what part of Catholic doctrine on faith and morals to accept. In a recent essay at

http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/07/st-thomas-aquinas-and-anne-rice.html

the blog examines the Anne Rice case in light of the teaching of Augustine and Aquinas.

How right Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, was back in the 1980s when he responded to his interviewer's question (The Ratzinger Report, p.45) that the key to the crisis in the Church is in ecclesiology. "My impression is that the authentically Catholic meaning of the reality 'Church' is tacitly disappearing, without being expressly rejected. Many no longer believe that what is at issue is a reality willed by the Lord himself."

I admired the works of Anne Rice's Catholic period, but a glance at her Facebook page, with tens of thousands of followers, shows that she always used that site more to attack the Church than to evangelize for it. And whenever she brought up a topic on which Church teaching is settled and clear, but on which she continued to hold heretical views, she elicited a flood of vehemently anti-Catholic posts from her followers.

It seems that sometimes celebrities--Tony Blair appears to be another example--join or return to the Church more in the hope of bringing her round to their way of seeing things than to submit to her teaching authority, especially where that teaching conflicts with liberal-secularist orthodoxy.

Paradoxically, it is often easier for those who move and have their friends and family in liberal-secularist circles to accept Catholic dogma on, say, the mystery of the Trinity, than to accept and publicly support those teachings on morals and the nature of the Church that conflict most sharply with prevalent secularist assumptions and liberal public opinion--questions like same-sex marriage or ordination of women or contraception.

Another Anti-Catholic Rant from the New York Times

Once again, a shamelessly biased anti-Catholic rant from Maureen Dowd. (On the phenomenon of anti-Catholic Catholics like Dowd, Garry Wills, et al., see The New Anti-Catholicism by Philip Jenkins.) Contrary to the claim in her latest op-ed piece, the Vatican said nothing to equate mock ordinations of women and clergy sex abuse. Yes, it was a PR mistake--another own goal--to address these grave but utterly different offenses in the same document, but that's all.

As for the two "inquisitions" of nuns that exercise Ms. Dowd so mightily, these visitations were long overdue. The investigations of the seminaries that had adopted an actively homosexual culture, aided and abetted by nuns, came much too late too. (See Michael Rose's Goodbye, Good Men for details.) The Church's older religious orders and liberal seminaries did immense damage to the Church, infected as they were by a Sixties climate of "anything goes" in faith and morals. The irony is that the liberals who promoted these developments in the 1970s (when clergy sex abuse rose to the level of the male population as a whole before falling back close to zero today) are using the crisis they helped create to denounce the Vatican's efforts to clean up the mess.

Meanwhile, much to the annoyance of the aging liberals, it is the young, orthodox, and faithful parts of the Church, the new strict religious communities and seminaries, that are thriving as the liberal Catholic project dies off. Still, it will take decades for the Church to recover from the damage in every area--in catechesis, liturgy, architecture, music, ecclesiology, theology, and morals--that that liberal project wrought.