Anne Rice has left the building

by Jodi Doff

That building would be the Catholic Church. 

Rice was never exactly the follower the Catholic Church dreams of.  She’s known primarily for either the seriously sexual Vampire Chronicles (the first of which was written the year Stephanie Meyer was born), or the seriously soporific Sleeping Beauty Trilogy (a BDSM series that never gets any more BDSMish than repetitive spankings).  Then there’s also that series on witches in there somewhere.

But in 1998, Rice had an epiphany, returning to the Catholic Church she’d left as a teen, she started churning out the Christ the Lord series of Christian novels.  Vampires, be damned, every institution, religious or not, loves its converts, especially those high profile media savvy ones and she was welcomed back into the fold.

Last month, Anne Rice had yet another conversion.  While it was a spiritual search that had brought her back, Rice couldn’t reconcile spirituality and Christian love with the anti-feminist rhetoric or the lengths the Catholic Church will go to prevent same-sex marriage. Anne announced her intention to split from the Church on her Facebook page in July 28. 

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.”

Rice told NPR that the Catholic Church’s support of (the recently overturned) Prop 8 was the final straw.

“Certainly I will never go back to being that atheist and that pessimist that I was,” she says. “I live now in a world that I feel God created, and I feel I live in a world where God witnesses everything that happens… I found God, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be a supporting member of any organized religion,” Rice says.

 


 

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