Anne Rice quits being Catholic

I've just learned about Anne Rice’s dramatic quit from Catholicism in Guardian’s G2 today. There is an interview with Emma Brockes about her new novel, Of Love and Evil, and a picture of Anne sitting in the grounds of her balmy estate in Palm Springs.

The statement she posted on Facebook (reprinted in today’s G2) only really says that she has left the Catholic Church; not necessarily her faith:

"I quit," she wrote. "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. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."

The question Emma asks is: what took her so long? Well, there are Catholics who don’t follow the dogma and who are able to live with the contradiction. I guess Anne felt she couldn’t.

When I was doing some research in Berlin a couple of months ago, the curator assisting me told me that the daughter of one of the subjects I was studying lives in Palm Springs. I asked what she had said about the place. The curator said she had been told that it was a great place to live because nothing ever happens there.

India - Orissa One Year On

I have just come back from India where I have been reporting on the continuing existence of the caste system (which is legally abolished but still practised) and the situation for people in Orissa whose lives were turned upside down when fundamentalists went on a murderous rampage in August last year. I will post a link to the reports once they are published. For now, here are a few of my photos from Orissa.
The woman wearing glasses and a creamy coloured kurta is Rama Hansraj, a relief worker working with Dalits (the Untouchable, discriminated outcast in India) and Adivasis (tribal people considered even lower on the pecking order than Dalits, according to the caste system). She is standing with displaced villagers from the Kando tribe and Pano Dalits in Kandhamal, Orissa. In the background are the first signs of the infrastructure for a new village, which has recently been legally demarcated. Rama (a Dalit herself) is working for a Catholic relief fund - not because she is a Catholic, but because this is the best way she can help her people. She is truely amazing.

The Kandho and Pano people of Kandhamal, Orissa, perform a traditonal honary welcome with singing and dancing. A man welcomes us at one of the handful of remaining relief camps in Kandhamal, Orissa. All the government-run camps have closed (there were around 17 camps in Kandhamal this time last year). I heard horror stories about the squalor in the State-provided camps. Many people were forced to flee, not only their burning homes, but also the camps. This camp was aided by the Church. A woman at the same relief camp as above.


Kandho and Pano displaced villagers tell of what happened to them at the end of August last year. Many lost loved-ones and 5,000 homes across Orissa were burned. The violence was started after a hard-line, anti-Christian Hindu leader, Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati , was murdered by Maoists, some of them Christian. Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati was the leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad party. Hindu fundamentalists reacted by persecuating Christians.



Children at the Happy Valley Children's Home in Kandhamal, Orissa. Happy Valley Children's Home helped with the relief effort in the area, providing food and clothes to refugees and finding them shelter. A Hindu girl - probably on her way to dance at a wedding - spotted on the road to Berhampur, Orissa. On the back of the auto rickshaw that the beautifully painted Hindu girl was travelling in, a boy clings on for a ride.Traffic on the road from Bhubaneswar to Berhampur, Orissa.

Crab and prawn fishing are an important export from Chilika Lake, the largest lake in Orissa.
The green and hilly landscape of Orissa, a north eastern state of India (there are 28 states in India).

Ecumenical Vision: Catholicism

Catholicism has been given a bit of a rough ride in this blog, so I thought I would give it a break today.

It goes without saying that I am critical of the Catholic Church and that a certain amount of suspending disbelief is just about to occur between the lines, but - that said - there are things I like about the Catholic Church.

One of them is the theatrical display of High Church. Having attended a modest and modern Methodist Church as a youth, I was awestruck the first time I witnessed a High Church service with incense, elaborate robes and long liturgies. Catholic Churches tend to be amazing displays of artwork, so intricate and breathtaking, that they inspire expansive sagas from atheists like Ken Follett. Some of the stories of the saints, whatever you may think about them, can also be seen as exemplifying the yearning of the human soul. Bernini’s Saint Teresa d’Avila in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome is a cliché, Damien Hirst’s Exquisite Pain sculpture of Saint Bartholomew hasn’t been around long enough yet to become one.

Another thing is the obvious presence of a female figure in the Church. When I was still young enough to delude myself, I thought the exaltation of Mary in the form of chapels within Catholic Churches answered a spiritual need. Protestant Churches don’t tend to dwell on the notion of an impossible earthly figure – a virgin mother – but I never knew anyone who talked about the idea of God being female and, even when I did, it wasn’t clear how that was being imagined. The rosary also makes for the odd line of poetry, i.e. “blessed is the fruit of thy womb”. I will always remember seeing a cut-out picture of Mary stuck in the corner of a bedroom in a beloved friend’s home. She was an atheist and was quite vague about why it was even on her wall... I think she liked its mystical suggestions.

A friend who was brought up a Catholic told me that, while she rejected Catholicism, it did have some good qualities. She argued that confession was cathartic and that guilt could be a good thing. I think that depends on what you do with your guilt. Some personalities may internalise it, some may project it while others may externalise it on to a cast-out object relation (a father figure, for example). I was once made to feel very guilty by a nun who knew I wasn’t a Catholic and saw me receive Holy Communion in a Catholic Church (when I should have folded my arms across my chest instead of accepting the Eucharist). But this same nun also showed me around her convent (I was curious) and told me to “take my time” choosing a book from the library while she sat and waited. (I eventually picked a book called A Theology of Liberation because I liked the title, but I never went on to read it. I don’t think she ever read it either.)

Warnings Against Condoms And Virginia Woolf

If you haven’t heard anything ludicrous today, try this: “The idea that you can solve a great spiritual crisis like AIDS with a few mechanical contraptions like condoms is ridiculous.”

Aids a "spiritual crisis"??!!!!

This piece of lunacy comes from the RC Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, reported in The Church Times today. He was, says the report, talking to Sky News at the time.

Cardinal Pell goes on to say that the sexual revolution came out of “Virginia Woolf and that crowd” and “is ruining society”.

Cardinal Pell's history clearly starts and finishes in the 20th century. And his knowledge of the Bloomsbury set is probably even dimmer.

It is almost too stupid a comment to bother arguing against. I think I will leave it.

Arthur Rimbaud Biog Reviewed In Catholic Press

In a week where The Pope has come out and shown the world just how inhumane his sexual ethics are, it was refreshing to open The Tablet (weekly UK Catholic magazine) and find a review of “Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel”.

Edmund White has written a short biography of the French poet who, it turns out, was a Catholic; or an “improbable” one, if you go by Hilary Davies’ review. It is hardly surprising that Rimbaud was a Catholic. In mid 19th century France, most people would have been. And it is also nothing new that a homosexual poet would have a religious affinity.

What made me smile was the last paragraph is Davies’ review:

“There are times when private passions should remain just that. This is a quite unnecessary book.”

The rest of Davies’ review preceding this paragraph is a robust critique which seemingly displays a thorough knowledge of Rimbaud’s poetry, as well as his older lover Verlaine’s, alongside what appears to be an informed opinion about better biographies to read on Rimbaud.

Clearly, some passions are not so easily satiated!

Dans Le Monde Du Pape

Anyone who has ever fallen in love with an illusion will have great sympathy with the anonymous young writer in the film, Dans La Ville de Sylvia, as he walks around Strasbourg consumed by the projection of his muse. Because he (the actor Xavier Lafitte) is beautiful, and his fantasy harmful towards no one but himself, the sensitive artist is easily forgiven.

The Pope, however, is not.

Today’s papers are full of reports about how Pope Benedict XVI has announced that condoms are not the answer to Africa’s fight against HIV and Aids.

Speaking to journalists on his flight to Cameroon, the Pontiff said the condition was, "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone; that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

I wish it were an illusion that this man’s belief in a misogynistic, homophobic and sadistic God could not affect the lives of so many Christians across the world. According to a report in today’s Guardian, 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to be infected by the disease. Past BBC reports say that there are 143 million Catholics in Africa.

If I didn’t know there were outreach programmes in Africa spreading the right message about HIV and Aids prevention, including Christian outreach programmes, my despair would be a lot greater.

The final scene in Dans La Ville de Sylvia shows how successful the director, Jose Luis Guerin, has been in transferring the artist's projection on to the viewer. The camera holds still showing a shot of a street in Strasbourg. People walk in and out of the frame and, while Xavier remains out of it, there is a palpable lightness of being. I sat there bracing myself for Xavier’s entrance and for, what by this point has become, the heaviness of his desire.

But he doesn’t come.