Turns out Anne Rice has been experiencing a few problems with real-life vampires.   Having made a fortune off the old Catholic folk legend…

[bear with me while I pause this sentence for a few writerly gripes:

[I was a tad pissed when Interview With the Vampire came out, since I’d been vaguely thinking about writing something similar,  but — I hate truth when it applies to myself — she did it better than I would have…

[well, at least she did with that first book…

[the grudging tone being exactly what I mean about too much truth… ]

… okay, griping done.  So having made a fortune and bought lots of houses and all that, Rice very publicly “became a Christian,”  or rather, took up the Catholicism she’d abandoned in her teens.   The Mel-Gibson-defending kind of Catholicism (as in brave-hearted, misunderstood Mel).   Now, ten years later, after some truly awful Christ-y books and having retreated from New Orleans to an air-conditioned Palm Springs life surrounded by glassy-eyed dolls  (this Daily Telegraph piece was kind)  and presumably influenced by the bad publicity created by priestly pederasty, she’s discovered — pow! — that she has a conscience, and has handed in her Church membership card.

Ever a woman of the times, she didn’t retreat in silence, or write to the Pope.  Instead, she quit on Facebook, which was reported by Gawker, and is being re-reported, re-tweeted, re-posted etc as I write.

It took her two tries to do it (that’s the trouble with being a writer — you’re always revising).  Here’s the first go:

and here’s the second:

Only one thing to say here, and appropriately it’s a play on a line from The Fearless Vampire Killers:  “Oy, lady, do you have the wrong Christians…”

(f you missed out on the Polanski movie, a Jewish vampire, faced with a luscious shiksa holding up a cross to ward him off, says “Oy lady, do you have the wrong vampire…”)

Rice evidently expects kudos and warm-hearted acceptance back into the agnostic fold, but I’m not buying.   The real question is this:  Couldn’t she have chosen better Christians in the first place?  Has she never heard of liberation theology?  (rhetorical question — evidently not).   And since when are all Christians right-wing fundamentalist bigots?

True, those bigots have tried their best to lay sole claim to the title of Christian — they’d register Jesus as a trademark if they could.  But even someone as averse as I am to organized religion can see that there’s plenty of Christians out there who don’t go round loudly proclaiming their Christianity or wearing what-would-Jesus-do bracelets or bowing to the Pope no matter what new idiocy emerges from the Vatican.  These are the Christians who actually do spend their lives acting in the spirit of Jesus instead of the letter of some pastoral or papal law.

But of course Rice could only have chosen one of the most closed-minded forms of Christianity.  The metaphor is just too juicy to resist, because the fundamentalist churches are her bread and butter — vampires for Christ, sucking the life out of body, mind, and soul.

Now here’s a call for Pope Benedict to resign that I can believe in, unlike that by Christopher Hitchens (see my earlier post, 4/18).

Singer Sinead O’Connor can hardly be accused of jumping on the bandwagon.  She was herself incarcerated in one of the Irish church’s infamous Magdalene asylums — forced-labor homes for “fallen” teenage girls.  And she was way ahead of the suddenly current pedophilia scandal when she protested Church silence on child abuse by tearing up a photo of the then-pope, John Paul II, on Saturday Night Live back in 1992 .  Yes, nearly twenty years ago.

The Sinead O’Connor who appeared last night on the Rachel Maddow show seemed like another woman that that gorgeous, sleek, pop icon.  “Dowdy” some reports said, disapprovingly — I mean, how can you possibly pay attention to a woman who doesn’t even bother to tart herself up for the camera?   In fact O’Connor was not dowdy;  she was real.  And what she said was far more forceful because of that reality.

She went further than she did in her Op-Ed for the Washington Post three weeks ago, written after Benedict’s pastoral letter of apology for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests in Ireland.  “To many people in my homeland,” she wrote in the WaPo, “the pope’s letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country.”

“The only thing that I think would make anyone happy,” she told Maddow, “which would honor not only the victims but the Holy Spirit who these people claim to be representing, would be for him to actually admit that there was an orchestrated cover-up and get out of office, and let us have a church which is run by people who actually believe in God.”

Then she called for the pope and the whole hierarchy not just to resign, but to be tried in open court on criminal charges of child abuse and conspiracy to conceal child abuse.   And she did it in the name of the Holy Ghost, with the ghosts of all those abused children forced into silence behind her.

Impressive.  And far more effective than all the Hitchens rantings in the world.   Her clear, calm passion and determination would have me, if I were Ratzinger/Benedict, shaking in my little red booties.

See the whole interview here.

“New atheists” Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are having a ball with the pedophile priest scandal — it seems to prove everything they’ve ever said about the evils of religion.

It’s disturbing enough that anyone at all is having a ball with this ghastly issue, though maybe that’s inevitable when the Hitchens-Dawkins style of atheism has all the hallmarks of being a religion of its own.  But worse is that their call for the Pope to resign smacks more than a little of… well, to be kind, disingenuousness.  To be less kind, hypocrisy.

If you don’t believe in medicine, you’re hardly going to call for a better doctor.  If H and D really believe all they say about the evils of religion, then there’s no way they could imagine that a change of Pope could make any difference, especially when nobody in the upper reaches of Churchly hierarchy seems capable of plain human feeling — capable, that is, of expressing pure unadulterated outrage that such things have been done under the guise (literally) of priestly robes.

I don’t question H and D’s outrage,  but while most of us are watching this unfold with horror, they can barely contain their glee.

I wish I could feel that glee, but I’m with Nick Kristof on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times, talking about “the other Catholic church.”  This is the “grass-roots church” of nuns and priests working with the poor, the sick, and the needy both in the States and worldwide.  “Their magnificence,” writes Kristof, “lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness.”

Maybe H and D could learn just a bit from that selflessness.   They’ve leapt on the bandwagon of scandal with no apparent purpose other than self-promotion.

Or maybe Hitchens is running for Pope?