Anne Rice has left the Catholic Church for a second time; of course, this is not news... in fact, it is a couple of months old, but I wanted to bring it up because there has been a few high-profile defections in recent years that share a pattern that I find indicative of the failure of the Church to effectively catechize both cradle Catholics and converts. Anne Rice was both a cradle Catholic AND a convert, so her defection is particularly useful for these purposes.
First, she left the Church and became an atheist when she was quite young. This was an all too common phenomenon of her generation, so should really come as no surprise; however, her return to the Catholic Church was a clear sign that she recognized something was deeply wrong with her life... something was missing. She is even able to identify things like the Eucharist as being very important, but not important enough to overcome her ideological convictions (or her personal life). Ms. Rice returned to the Catholic Faith with some heavy baggage, baggage that would test a much stronger person than herself and was probably not assisted by her parish priest.
Ms. Rice's life, until her reconversion, was completely tied into the sexual revolution. Her books celebrated hedonistic sexuality and homosexuality. When her own son embraced a homosexual lifestyle, she was affirmed and celebrated this choice. I was incredibly impressed that she was able to actually bring herself back into the Church, but I knew (from several interviews) that she had not really embraced many of the Church's teachings (particularly regarding issues of sexuality).
This is a problem, because the priest who received her back to the Church was clearly not focused on getting Ms. Rice to understand the nature of Catholic teaching on sexuality. Ms. Rice was clearly accepted back into the Church without affirming her belief in the authority of the Church's teachings.
With this in mind, we cannot be surprised or even particularly disappointed in her decision to leave the Church. She never really entered into full communion with the Church the first place, so her decision to leave again is not really a full break with the Church per se.
In order for Ms. Rice to have truly embraced the Church and truly entered into full communion with Christ's Mystical Body on Earth, she would have had to renounce many of her earlier decisions and to rescind her acceptance and celebration of her son's sexuality. Admitting our own mistakes requires a nearly herculean act of will and is a major stumbling block for many who desire to return to the Church (it certainly was for me). Not forcing Ms. Rice to confront her own errors did not prepare her to deal effectively with a life in the Faith. Not forcing Ms. Rice to confront her own errors made her particularly vulnerable to the lures of the secular world and her own past. This caused her life in the Church to be filled with contradiction and become even more difficult than it might have been. Anne Rice was set up to fail by her pastor.
This is a common problem with liberal catechesis, as it does not effectively prepare the catechumen for the challenges of living the Faith in the world. As a teacher of Catholic students, I see this problem constantly as students' beliefs are challenged and they simply do not have an effective enough grounding in the Faith to resist these challenges.
We, as Catholics, cannot be surprised that so many young people (and others) leave the Faith when they simply do not understand that the Church is there to help them come to Truth; the Church incites change in people toward God. The Church does not change to suit the needs of believers; the nature of being a believer is to believe, if one does not believe then one is not a believer... and the Church is a community of believers.
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