Pastor Brian McLaren respond to Anne Rice’s recent departure from Catholic Christianity at CNN.
Why I support Anne Rice but am still a Christian
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4 responses to “Why I support Anne Rice but am still a Christian”
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Anne Rice says “following Christ does not mean following His followers.” OK. She also says Christians as a group are “quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous.” Well, yes. Just look at this messageboard. Look at the councils in the history of the Church. In this same Church we have the likes of Dom Helder Camara (canonization soon?) and Jose Maria Escriva. But check out Nicholas Kristof:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/opinion/18kristof.html
“Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for.
“This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.
“This is the church of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America and the Cabrini Sisters in Africa. There’s a stereotype of nuns as stodgy Victorian traditionalists. I learned otherwise while hanging on for my life in a passenger seat as an American nun with a lead foot drove her jeep over ruts and through a creek in Swaziland to visit AIDS orphans. After a number of encounters like that, I’ve come to believe that the very coolest people in the world today may be nuns.”
Doesn’t the good these nuns (and people like them) do outweigh the other stuff in the…
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Anne Rice says “following Christ does not mean following His followers.” OK. She also says Christians as a group are “quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous.” … In this same Church we have the likes of Dom Helder Camara (canonization soon?) and Jose Maria Escriva.
I hope the parallelism that suggests St. Josemaria is “deservedly infamous” was accidental. One of the backers of the cause for canonization was Archbishop Oscar Romero, who just 5 years before his death, wrote to Pope Paul VI praising Opus Dei (to which he had gone for spiritual direction) asking that the cause for St. Josemaria be opened quickly.
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Dear Samuel,
Thank you for giving me the chance to clarify. The point of mentioning Camara and Escriva was contrast. This Church is home to people with different–sometimes opposing–thought and style. As a consequence, I believe, they can be “quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious.” (Am not clear on what Rice means with the words ‘deservedly infamous’). I bet in this very forum Camara is to some a hero (and saint). For others the hero is Escriva. (If I remember right–I could be wrong–Opus Dei was involved in undoing Camara’s legacy organizational structures after his death. The conservatives, nevertheless, strongly opposed Camara’s work, if not him outright.)
But my main point was, as Kristof says, the good that missionary nuns, priests, brothers and lay people do for the poor in the missions outweighs the Church’s demerits elsewhere.
Vic
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Bryan Cones at U.S. Catholic has an interesting blog entry, tangentially related:
http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/2010/08/forget-anne-rice-its-sheila-obrien-church-should-worry-about
Money quote: “Think about who she is: a cradle Irish Catholic, a professional woman, a wife and mother. In other words O’Brien is the ‘thick middle’ of the American Catholic Church. She is no theology wonk, probably doesn’t care much about church politics or liturgical translations, and probably doesn’t care to quote the Catechism. But she’s active in her parish, she has raised her children Catholic, and she probably contributes generously not only to her parish but to Catholic Charities.
…I don’t get worried about the church when Anne Rice leaves, though I enjoy being in a church so baroque that the queen of the undead belongs. But I do worry when Sheila O’Brien and people like her are ready to throw in the towel.”
by
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