January/February 2006 Download this document in Adobe PDF

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Contents Letter from the Director Into the Light Building Evangelizing Eucharistic Communities Upcoming Events Learn to Communicate Your Faith Support Our Ministry

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Letter from the Director

“And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Matthew 4:19,20 Dear Friend, Peace and blessings for the New Year! Included in this newsletter is an article about Anne Rice, an internationally known novelist who has returned to God and the Church after over forty years. Having sold over 50 million books worldwide, Mrs. Rice’s conversion has created quite a stir in the media and among her fans.

Mrs. Rice wrote many dark supernatural novels as she longed for a supernatural hero and for meaning in life. She found both in the Risen Lord Jesus! Her turning to Christ and the Catholic Church and the widespread discussions resulting from her conversion illustrate the spiritual hunger many people have. Anne Rice had friends who accompanied her and helped her turn to the Lord and to the Church. We need to be like those friends who helped her find The Way (John 14:6).

For each of us as Christians our life vocation most essentially has to do with the great adventure of following Christ and learning how to fish in new and exciting ways. Precisely in our station of life and on the paths we take each day, Jesus wants to use you and me as his evangelical witnesses in word and lifestyle. There is an urgent need in our culture for us to bear testimony to the transforming love of God.

Here in the United States we continue to see efforts to ban the use of the name of God in public, and aggressive attempts to remove all traces of his existence: Take Christ out of Christmas; remove any reference to the 10 commandments from government buildings; don’t mention God in the pledge of allegiance; don’t even suggest that there is a God involved with creation. Yet, as hard as we may try to deny Him, there remains within the human heart the undeniable need for God who holds the key to the meaning of our existence. Every person - Buddhist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, pagan, atheist or agnostic - regardless of sinful or righteous lifestyles, all are created with the capacity and need for relationship with God. Through Jesus the Son, God has definitively spoken, revealing himself and his purposes for all humanity (see Hebrews 1:1-3). The purpose of human existence is found not in ourselves, but in the One who created us. Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, is the key to understanding our purpose in life!

“I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” John 10:10

Millions of people do not know that there is a God who loves them and has sent His Son Jesus to make possible this relationship restored to give abundant life! Some of these millions of people who do not have relationship with him are people who live and work with us. They are family members, friends and people with whom our lives intersect regularly. And, you and I can reach out to help them to know the love of God through our prayers, witness of life, and willingness to explicitly share with them about our most important relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ!

We just received a letter from a woman who attended ChristLife’s Sharing Christ course at her parish. She wrote that before the course she never thought about talking with others about Christ and on the rare occasions when she did, she dreaded it! Having completed the Sharing Christ course, this same person is actively looking for opportunities to share the good news with others!

To know Christ and to make Him known, this is God’s plan and our purpose! ChristLife is committed to working with you to help Catholics mobilize to share the love of God in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit with the millions of people who do not know this good news. Let’s be like the friends who helped Anne Rice find her way to the Lord Jesus!

Thanks so much for your ongoing prayer and financial support.

Your brother,

Dave Nodar,
Director of ChristLife

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Into the Light

Novelist Anne Rice leaves the vampire Lestat and embraces Christ, "the ultimate supernatural hero Lynn Vincent, World Magazine, December 3, 2005 She was known for shrouds. [Anne] Rice spent nearly three decades sculpting a reputation as literary queen of the damned—and now, at age 64, she has declared that canon closed. After rejecting her Catholic faith nearly half a century ago, she says she is reconciled with God and dedicating the rest of her life to writing only for—and about—Jesus Christ.

Her first novel of this kind, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf), hit stores on Nov. 1. The first-person narrative of Jesus as a young boy follows Jesus from His family's hiding in Egypt back to Jerusalem and Nazareth, where He slowly learns His true identity. The story emanates the light of nascent majesty, in stark contrast with the gaslight gloom of Mrs. Rice's earlier work, and is the first in a projected series.

In Mrs. Rice's books—she's sold 50 million worldwide—characters who are undeniably evil also search for significance and long for God, sometimes narrowly missing a chance for spiritual redemption. Still, her sensual and unflinchingly graphic writing is a marketer's delight: In one book, for example, [a vampire] drinks the blood of Jesus. That's why her literary turnabout has sparked a national discussion. As for her return to faith, Mrs. Rice said she is surprised "people are so interested, that they really care about this. I didn't know that they would."

Born in New Orleans in 1941, she was named Howard Allen O'Brien, after her father. But on the first day of Catholic school, she told the nuns her name was Anne and it stuck. Her father worked for the post office. Her mother, Katherine, was an alcoholic who died when Anne was only 14. At age 18, while attending San Francisco State University, Anne broke with her childhood faith. Her apostasy, she says, resulted from exposure to a wider world: "I stopped believing that [the Catholic Church] was 'the one true church established by Christ to give grace.'" She also stopped believing in God.

In 1962, in a civil ceremony in Denton, Texas, she married Stan Rice, a poet, painter, and committed atheist whom Mrs. Rice calls "one of the most honorable and conscience-driven people I ever knew." In the early 1990s the Rices returned to New Orleans, where Mrs. Rice continued to write, often one novel each year. But in 1998, she gradually began to feel again the press of God: "I began to be more and more concerned with my relationship with God in my books. I wanted to be in the company of God, in the company of the drama . . . what we can know, what we don't know, what we believe."

She began attending Mass again and participating in sacraments. In 2000, her husband agreed to remarry her in the church: Despite his own atheism, "he was very supportive about my writing [Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt], and he was fine with me going back to the church. It surprised him, but not that much. I don't think I had ever stopped talking about God."

Painstaking historical research has marked all of Mrs. Rice's novels. Mrs. Rice's research took her through the literature written by those she calls "the skeptical critics," beginning with the New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment. "I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud," she writes in an author's note in her new book.

But she plowed on, "ready to risk everything," particularly her newly recovered faith: "The skeptical New Testament scholarship tries to prove to you that the Gospels don't hold up. It takes great fortitude to subject yourself to that kind of literature, to seriously take notes, to follow the arguments, to draw conclusions. You could come out destroyed." But she came out concluding that the skeptics were wrong, perpetrators and victims of some of the worst scholarship she'd ever seen, built with poor research and reasoning on a foundation that presumed the Gospels weren't true.

She continued scouring the Gospels herself, not only to absorb the unfolding life of Christ, but to delve into the how of Christianity itself: "I could see that this was a great mystery. How could Christianity bust into the Roman Empire and take over the world in only 200 years? I was looking to see how this thing worked itself out, day by day, month by month, year by year." She came to understand that Christianity achieved what it did because Jesus rose from the dead: That was what made sense of Christianity's spread.

Whether caught up in the book-tour whirl, or padding barefoot in a flannel nightgown in the master bedroom of her 11,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style villa overlooking the Pacific, Mrs. Rice reads day and night. Last month she was grappling with Mere Christianity: "C.S. Lewis opens the door to all kinds of wonderful thoughts I didn't consider before. . . . That Jesus wants to bring us to perfection and that there's no stopping Him . . . and that theories of atonement are not the atonement. We live in a world where people want to spell out how Jesus saved you and that isn't always so helpful. The words are fine. I've understood the words since I was 6 years old. But I wanted to go further than that. I wanted to realize it."

When Mrs. Rice writes and speaks of these discoveries, you sense her heart soaring. Holding her faith dear, like a pearl of great price, she revels in the joy of being able to embrace Christ intellectually, of not having to compartmentalize a faith at odds with history. "I've never been this happy in my life before," she said. "I never expected things to come together like this, to be so completely unified in purpose and intent."

The above is a shortened version of the full article, which can be found in our Why Jesus? section. Also in this section is the Author's Note to her new book, "Christ the Lord."  Reprinted with permission by World Magazine (www.worldmag.com).

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Building Evangelizing Eucharistic Communities

A springboard for bringing the mission of the Church to life!

"They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to prayer.… Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved." (Acts 2:42, 46-47)

Learn to Communicate Your Faith Check out ChristLife's newest video series: Sharing Christ. Learn how to tell friends, co-workers, and family about the Good News of Jesus. The Sharing Christ course is available in several packages, convenient for dioceses, parishes, small groups, and individuals. Visit our bookstore to purchase all course materials.