Anne Rice accuses Catholics of knowingly belonging to a criminal enterprise.
Carl Olson responds to the charge.
Anne Rice's fans descend on Carl's blog to castigate Olson for being judgmental.
Anne Rice wades in with this:
Is there a conflict of interest here on this blog?Apart from the fascination of a Famous Person mixing it up with "the folks," there is something sad about Anne Rice acting like a baglady screaming at the traffic.
Is anyone connected with this blog a friend or associate of notorious convicted sexual abuser, Jesuit Donald McGuire?
If this is the case, perhaps you can explain in detail.
Thank you for linking to my discussion on Amazon and to my Facebook Page.
No doubt this will bring more Catholics, former Catholics, and Catholic critics
to my efforts to urge rank and file Catholics to speak up for the victims of clergy abuse.
Rice is a sad person. Like a lot of people, she was faced with the choice of siding with the world, i.e, with her class prejudice, friends and family, in affirming the goodness of gayness and gay marriage and abortion or submitting to the teachings of Jesus through the Catholic Church. She found that she couldn't give up her allegiance to the world, and her project now is to speak evil against the Body of Christ.
She just sounds like a complete nut in doing it, however.
Update:
Carl Olson also links to this article on the proper way to defend the Church, which includes some observations from the guy who introduced me to Aristotle [via the Teaching Company]:
The most effective response to veiled attacks against the Church is one that exposes misrepresentations, states the verifiable truth, explains genuine Catholic doctrine and provides examples from the lives of Catholic saints and martyrs, according to speakers at a Fordham University program.Very true, but tedious.
The speakers addressed the topic “Suspicion and Conspiracy: Defending the Reputation of Noble Individuals” March 21. The program was sponsored by Fordham University, the Holy See Mission to the United Nations and the Path to Peace Foundation.
Jesuit Father Joseph Koterski, a philosophy professor at Fordham, said Pope Benedict XVI thought very deeply about how to respond, or how not to respond, to indirect accusations against the Church.
He said the Pope’s 2006 encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love) is a model for Catholics to answer charges made using innuendo and suspicion, instead of those developed through traditional forms of scholarly argument that present actual evidence for the position taken.
Father Koterski described psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, socialist Karl Marx and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as “masters of suspicion” because they attacked the Church and its motives with innuendo and insinuation, rather than straightforward argument. He said Pope Benedict is “our German shepherd standing resolutely in the face of three German wolves.”
“The distinctive feature of arguments preferred by the masters of suspicion, and of postmodern and deconstructionist thinkers in their wake, is to proceed by raising suspicions about the motives of their opponents,” Father Koterski said. When charges are based on resentment or envy, rather than evidence or argument, the target is put on the defensive.
“A modest response can make it seem that the accused is really guilty and incapable of mounting any more of a defense, while a vigorous response can easily suggest one is trying to hide something under the very energy of the reply,” he said.
Father Koterski said in Deus Caritas Est Pope Benedict steers a middle course by combining an extremely clear but rhetorically modest explanation of genuine Catholic doctrine with an exposure of the main misrepresentations that are part of the smokescreen laid down by the masters of suspicion.
The Pope then provides stories of Catholic saints and martyrs whose sacrifices are above suspicion, Father Koterski said.
Pope Benedict counters “attacks by Freud and Nietzsche on Christianity’s alleged fear of eros by explaining the authentic Christian view of sexuality and love,” he said. Likewise, the encyclical addresses the Marxist use of resentment, as illustrated in the famous phrase, “Religion is the opium of the people,” by first admitting where Marx’s social critique is right and then noting where Marx went wrong.
Father Koterski said the Pope’s stories about such saintly figures as Blessed Teresa of Kolkata, St. Don Bosco and St. Vincent de Paul add a human touch and an unanswerable set of examples to illustrate that the charges leveled against Christianity are groundless.
He said Pope Benedict responded wisely to the clergy sexual-abuse scandals in Germany and Ireland in 2010. “Not only did he swiftly put in place what was needed to deal with the crisis in a way that was at once compassionate, firm and realistic, but he also worked vigilantly to counter various slanders against the Church that arose in the press,” Father Koterski said.
Ronald Rychlak, associate dean at the University of Mississippi School of Law, engaged the audience with a spirited defense of actions by Pope Pius XII before and during the Second World War. He used examples from his book Hitler, the War and the Pope to rebut modern allegations that Pope Pius did not do enough to rescue Jews from Nazi persecution.
Rychlak displayed headlines and quotes published in The New York Times during World War II to show contemporary acknowledgment that the Pope condemned dictators, racism and treaty violators, spoke out forcefully against arrests of Jews in France and offered “sanctuary for all.” Rychlak said the Pope’s efforts were so rigorous that the Nazis called him “the evident mouthpiece of the Jews.”
An editorial in The New York Times on Christmas 1941, said, “The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas. ... The pope puts himself squarely against Hitlerism.”
After the war, Jewish leaders in Rome, what was known as Palestine and the United States publicly thanked Pope Pius for saving the lives of their people. The Israeli consul in Italy, Pinchas E. Lapide, said: “The Catholic Church saved more Jewish lives during the war than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations put together.”
Rychlak said, “During the war, at the end of the war and at his death in 1958, no one doubted where Pius XII stood.”
An off-the-wall accusation can be made in seconds - particularly since it usually plays off the "pseudo-knowledge" and prejudice that people walk around with - but a deconstruction of the falsity requires examining buried assumptions, documenting the truth, and patiently and simply describing the truth.
My review of "Hitler's Pope" required that I traipse into a myriad of details that Cornwell left out, such as the fact that Hitler had the power to outlaw and imprison the Centrist party - as he had the Communist party - before the Enabling Acts were passed. Likewise, Cornwell's cheap shot that Pius XII somehow failed to warn the Roman Jewish community about the round-up of the Jewish community on the morning it started ignores the fact that the Jewish community had been warned by their Chief Rabbi, but chose to put their trust in assurances made by Italian Fascists.
Cheap shots are easy. Facts are difficult.
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