Who needs spelling?

Anne Rice is in the comments of a review on Amazon for Gary Wills' new book.

She writes:

Anne Rice says:
I hope Amazon takes down this "review." It's not a review.
It is grossly unfair to put this hear and affect the star rating for this book.
I have reported this. I hope others do the same.
This person should send an email to the publisher.

So, if I make a typo, give me a break.

Shut up, they explained.

The best evidence that so much of the outrage of people that people like Anne Rice claim to feel about "priestly pedophilia" is hypocrisy can be shown by what they don't condemn, and might actually condemn the church for condemning, such as moral relativity, pornography and the fact that society was on its way to normalizing pedophilia before the scandal of "priestly pedophilia" - actually homosexual ebophilia - gave cultural activists a convenient club to tar the 99.9% of priests were totally innocent (it still may; the moral outrage against ebophilia seems conveniently selective; like Clinton and sexual harassment, it may just take the right "perp" being caught for us to be taught that "love knows no age.") 

We conveniently forget that Roman Polanski's sodomizing of a fourteen year old was treated as the punchline of jokes back in the '70s and that he was going to be given probation.  We don't hear Anne Rice condemn Americans for not being outraged by the sexual abuse that occcurs far more frequently in schools and dependent-adult homes.

Pertinent on this point is Pope Benedict's December 10, 2010 address:

We are well aware of the particular gravity of this sin committed by priests and of our corresponding responsibility. But neither can we remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light. There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society. The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times. From Bishops of developing countries I hear again and again how sexual tourism threatens an entire generation and damages its freedom and its human dignity. The Book of Revelation includes among the great sins of Babylon – the symbol of the world’s great irreligious cities – the fact that it trades with bodies and souls and treats them as commodities (cf. Rev 18:13). In this context, the problem of drugs also rears its head, and with increasing force extends its octopus tentacles around the entire world – an eloquent expression of the tyranny of mammon which perverts mankind. No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart – and all this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s freedom and ultimately destroys it.


In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained – even within the realm of Catholic theology – that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better than” and a “worse than”. Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today. Against them, Pope John Paul II, in his 1993 Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor, indicated with prophetic force in the great rational tradition of Christian ethos the essential and permanent foundations of moral action. Today, attention must be focussed anew on this text as a path in the formation of conscience. It is our responsibility to make these criteria audible and intelligible once more for people today as paths of true humanity, in the context of our paramount concern for mankind.

Crazy Anne.

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?


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.

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.

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.


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.”

 Very true, but tedious.

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.

Hell, hath no fury like the fan of a nihilistic author of Goth vampire stories scorned.

Anne Rice made a few caustic comments against the Catholic Church inspired by her commitment to the magisterium of nihilism.  A few Catholic bloggers responded.  Anne Rice's  fans respond with diatribe based on the idea that responding to a public criticism is mean and judgmental. 

Here is Dwight Longenecker's post:

It seems my post on Anne Rice has got a link on some fan page of hers. I thought the post on Anne was rather charitable considering some of the stuff she's been hurling at the Catholic Church, but if you want to read some irrational comments from angry folks tootle on over to the combox for the Anne Rice post and scroll down.


I was going to delete the more vituperative ones, but on second thought its better to let them stand. They speak for themselves. If you want to witness the irrational fury of those who hate Christ's Church, you'll find some examples in the combox.

Of course, none of the commenters take the time and trouble to actually address the content of my post. None of them offer rational debate. Instead we get all the usual shallow anti-Catholic foot stomping and door slamming about 'homophobia', 'corruption', 'lies', etc. Just more raging accusations of 'being judgmental'. Honestly, how old are these people? 13? They sound like seventh grade girls saying, "I'm more mature than you are!!"

And the offending post.

And Carl Olson's post, and the offending post.

Who would think that nihilists could get so worked up? 

It's almost as if they think that there are objective standards of truth and goodness.