Elizabeth Scalia

It was just about a year ago that Anne Rice”who two years earlier had chronicled her return to the Catholic church in the best-selling Called Out of Darkness; A Spiritual Confession”announced via Facebook that she was “quitting” Christianity:

I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or being a part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. 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… . . Continue Reading

Recently a reader at my blog asked me what it would take for me to call “heresy” on someone else. Apparently, to refuse to lightly j’accuse is to be continually vomited out of Jesus’ mouth in a lukewarm stream, but I may find redemption if only I will carp endlessly about how the world is ending and the church is dying, and lay the fault for it at the feet of the bishops and possibly of me, myself… . Continue Reading »

Let me begin this column with a disclaimer: I am not a big fan of Sarah Palin. The reason I know this is because any time I write anything either mildly or constructively critical of the woman, I get scores of emails excoriating me as a “Palin-hater from the get-go”, from people who are completely aware that I not only predicted her invite to the McCain ticket, but applauded it, too. But the reason I must make the disclaimer is to head-off those who truly do hate Palin and try to disguise their hate in concerns over how she dresses. These are the people who dismiss any defense of her as mindless wingnuttery… . Continue Reading »

Recently I came across two items which superficially would seem to have nothing at all to do with each other. The first was an advertisement: a religious sister was promoting a women’s retreat about “finding oneself” and “coming to a place of ‘centered’ peace.” Highlighted within the ad was a sort of inverted pyramid using decreasing-sized fonts to illustrate exactly how Sister intended to lead these women back to themselves, and center their peace … Continue Reading »

About 15 years ago a new Catholic parish was erecting its single-building church and social center. The pastor asked the religious sister who acted as Director of Religious Education to choose the tiles for the parish center’s bathrooms. The gentleman’s bathroom was outfitted in a rather pretty shade of gray with darker accents. The ladies room, however, startled everyone who entered it; gazing into the mirrors at their bilious reflections, woman after woman grimaced and asked “who on earth decided on spicy-mustard yellow?” … Continue Reading »

In last week’s column, I gave myself permission to wonder about one of the great unknowns: whether homosexuality originates through nature or nurture, and ” if the answer is “nature” ” what that might mean to our understanding of God, creation and calling. In attempting to explore the issue within the context of the Catechism and Catholic orthodoxy, I was hoping to straddle the divide between those who cannot discuss homosexuality without the word “abomination” eventually entering into it, and those who have long-since declared their spiritual autonomy over any sort of authoritative voice”be it divine, scriptural, traditional or founded upon study or prayer”preferring to embrace the absolute moral authority of collective sentimentalism… . Continue Reading »

At this past weekend’s 65th Annual Tony Awards, the prize for “Best Revival of a Play” went to Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Upon receipt of the award, Kramer said, “To gay people everywhere, whom I love so dearly, The Normal Heart is our history. I could not have written it had not so many needlessly died. Learn from it and carry on the fight. Let them know that we are a very special people, an exceptional people, and that our day will come.” … Continue Reading »

Since moving from the White House beat to the op-ed page of the New York Times, Maureen Dowd has made a career of throwing stones. In general she reserves the heaviest of them for launching toward Rome, but now it appears that her already-cramped reach has gotten the yips, and even her praise misses the plate. In her June 5 piece on Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a churchman of moderately progressive bent, Dowd discovers a Bishop she can like. … Continue Reading »

Father Robert Barron, writing recently on the Ascension of Christ, noted that the feast is difficult for contemporary, largely Greek-influenced, minds to grasp: The key to understanding both the meaning and significance of this feast is a recovery of the Jewish sense of heaven and earth… Jesus’s great prayer, which is constantly on the lips of Christians, is distinctively Jewish in inspiration: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Notice please that this is decidedly not a prayer that we might escape from the earth, but rather that earth and heaven might come together… . Continue Reading »

In her stupendous novel In This House of Brede, author Rumer Godden chronicles the pre- and post-Second-Vatican-Council journey of a successful English professional woman who becomes an enclosed Benedictine nun. When the novel’s main character, Philippa Talbot, is asked by a co-worker, “but will you be able to be obedient, a stiff-necked creature like you?” she responds rather naively, “I shall find it restful.” … Continue Reading »