Interview with Anne Rice

Melanie Hebert

April 15, 2008

Rancho Mirage, CA

Melanie: Can you start off by describing your very first understanding of what faith was, what God was, what religion was?

Anne: It’s hard to say what my first understanding of faith was because it was always there. I don’t remember the first time I went to church. I was always going to church. We were always going to church for visits, and always going to the chapel, and always going to mass. So I grew up with faith as part of life. It shaped our family’s existence. I mean we were Catholics who went to mass and communion every morning usually. We didn’t just go on Sunday, and our belief as I said was just a part of life. I think we grew up with the idea that a lot was expected of us because of our faith, that we had to live vital lives as Christians and as Catholics, that we had to do things every day of our life to kind of reflect our faith and our love of God. And that was a very beautiful way to grow up really. It was quite wonderful.

M: Did you ever question your beliefs at that time?

A: No, no. I never questioned anything really until I was in college. I was very much a gung-ho catholic actually, very gung-ho, and very interested in church history and the lives of the saints. I loved to read the lives of the saints. I’d say that I enjoyed very much being a Catholic. It was sort of an effortless enjoyment.

M: You mention very often that you were a poor reader until your college years and you also mention that you thought religion, or specifically Catholicism, was learned through books and that you never ‘not wanted’ to go to mass. You looked forward to attending every day. So what was it that that allowed you to learn differently from maybe other people of the Catholic religion?

A: Our religion was very sensuous in New Orleans. The churches we went to were absolutely beautiful. They were huge structures, and they were filled with paintings and filled with beautiful colorful statues. And they had magnificent altars. And I think daily mass was a very beautiful ceremony though it was very quiet. The priest was always dressed in beautiful silk vestments and the altar boy would be wearing a black robe, and just going up to the communion rail to receive communion was just a beautiful moment. You would be kneeling there at this beautiful marble altar rail that had a linen cloth under which you would place your hands and you would be seeing a beautiful altar lavishly decorated with flowers and golden candlesticks. You know, there was a certain saturation of your senses that this was sacred space. This was beautiful space. This was where God dwelled. And you were coming in here really to be reminded that he also dwells everywhere. It was interesting, I mean you really didn’t have to be a good reader to be a good Catholic. You really could learn everything that you needed from the sermons at mass, from going to mass, from seeing the church, from seeing the chapel, from seeing the statues of the saints, and from hearing stories from your parents- wonderful stories of great saints and converts. It was a very vibrant wonderful religion for me as I grew up. It was a great source of cultural knowledge because it was a European church. And our ties with Europe were vital as Catholics. Our pope was in Rome, and our saints were international saints. They came from many countries and backgrounds, and their statues were right there in our church. So I think it was a very wonderful coherent world that I grew up in.

M: And you mention Pope Pius from your childhood.

A: Well Pope Pius was the only pope I knew throughout my whole life. I think Pope Pius died after my senior year of high school. I’m not sure. So all of my life he was the pope. Just when I went away to college really were there other popes, and I didn’t know a whole lot about them. I left the church at 18, tragically, and I really lost contact with the whole flow of what was going on. Years later I was in Rome and actually saw the pope on Easter Sunday give a blessing, but I don’t know what pope it was. Now I realize it was Pope Paul VI, but I didn’t know at the time.

M: What did you think of it at the time? You were an atheist at the time?

A:  I was an atheist at the time, but it was still very moving to be in St. Peter’s Square with millions of people pressing and crowding and cheering as the pope gave blessings in all different languages. People from all different nations would cheer and scream and raise their banners, and it was quite exciting.

M: When you left the church at 18 what was it, I read that it was a conversation with a certain priest, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for you?

A: The conversation I had with the priest was certainly the end of it, but I was leaving because my faith was breaking away. I wanted to know about the wide world. I wanted to know what existentialism was and I wanted to know about the beats and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the writing of Jack Kerouac. I wanted to know all about what the modern world offered, and I made the mistake of thinking that I had to leave my church in order to do that. And I stopped talking to God, and I went off really pursuing an atheistic existence believing that that was facing reality. That I was waking up from a sheltered childhood. I think that many young people go through it. There was nothing really unique about what happened to me. I think it happens to many, many young people and they go through a period of rebellion against the church they grew up in. for me it lasted 38 years. I didn’t go back until 1998, and when I went back it was really the result of a lot of reading and pondering and thinking and realizing that I believed in God and that I loved him and trusted him and that I wanted to return to him.

M: These things you mention that you wanted to learn about the world, is there a time when you felt that your Catholic beliefs, prior to Vatican II specifically, wouldn’t allow you to learn or read or watch those ‘condemned’ movies?

A: At 18 I definitely felt that. I felt constrained. We weren’t really allowed to read books that would question our faith. We had what we called the index of forbidden books. And we had what we called the general index, and that meant that any book challenging the faith or offering an atheistic perspective would be forbidden to read. It would be a mortal sin to read that book so it was a very tight constraining religion. And we were also told that we could not watch any kind of movie that was lascivious or lewd and so we couldn’t watch a lot of foreign films, and foreign films were becoming the fashion then. They had a realism that was a lot higher than American films and nudism was a part of that. And we couldn’t do any of that. So it seemed very much that my church stood between me and the modern world, and stood between me and finding out what great American authors were about. We had never been allowed to read Ernest Hemingway when I was growing up. Yet I discovered that he was a great American author, perhaps one of the greatest of the century. And I wanted to read him, and I wanted to read Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and I wanted to read philosophy.  I actually didn’t turn out to be much of a reader of any of  the philosophical works that attracted me, but I certainly did read the literature… the wonderful books of Camus and the wonderful stories of Sartre, and I certainly fell in love with Hemingway and read his stories. And I think Hemingway’s perspective was always an atheistic perspective and almost a fatalistic perspective. And after I left the church of course all that seemed open to me. But I didn’t realize I was going to grieve as much as I did over my lost religion. I don’t think I ever was an atheist. I think I tried to be one because I thought it was what was expected of me as a modern person. I thought it was reality. I thought it was the discipline I had to follow but in my heart of hearts I was always grieving. And when I began to write novels they were full of that grief for a lost faith. They were about vampires but the vampires were heroes and heroines, and they were rebels, and they were searchers, and they were Also grieving for their lost humanity and their lost faith.

M: It was so interesting that you walked away from the church for 38 years believing you were an atheist at the time… but now you say you don’t think you really were an atheist. Do you think your readers for all those years would be disappointed to hear you say that now?

A: No, actually what they tell me is that they knew it all along. I get letter after letter after letter from people who say we always read your books as religious books. We always saw the conflict, and you know very early on priests and nuns would show up at my signings. And they started to tell me that they liked the books, particularly priests, and that they found a sort of Catholic symbolism in the writing. And my very own father who was a very strict Catholic told me the same thing, that he saw these books as having to do with the Catholic faith. That surprised me because I didn’t quite see it that way, I wasn’t conscience of it. But when I look back on it now I see there always was a continuity. These books were about searching for meaning and about feeling cast out and cut off.

M: And this grieving you talk about for so long… in college there was a period during the May Crowning, and you had grown up so accustomed to this time of year, at your college campus you went out and bought flowers and grieved for what you were missing and for your faith in the Virgin Mary. And that’s when I thought “Was she really an atheist?”

A: That’s really true. I went out on the lawn and I cried, and I held these flowers, and I sang the hymns that we had learned to sing at the May Processions and the May Crownings. And I was very much grieving for that lost world of faith, and especially the way it was in New Orleans. It had been so rich and so beautiful and the May Processions were so important and, yea that was rough.

M: And how old were you at that time?

A: I was 18 or 19.

M: So, right after you left? (the Catholic Church)

A: (nods) Right after

M: So maybe you weren’t sure yet?

A: I think I was out by then. I think grief was the name of the game.

M: Do you think you always felt, throughout those 38 years, that something was missing?

A: Definitely. I never was particularly convinced that the world had just somehow appeared here or that the universe had somehow come into being. I always thought the argument for atheism was a bit foolish and a bit arrogant. And the older I got, the more arrogant it seemed to simply state that the world had just come from nothing and that there was no meaning. And I guess I felt I was more an agnostic, somebody who couldn’t affirm their belief in God. But gradually I began to realize that the whole world was speaking to me of God. The more I found out about science the more I believed about god. When I read about DNA and the double helix and all the different things we were finding out scientifically in the 60s-80s I marveled. I saw the mind of God, I saw the imagination of God.

M: I know you have been associated with so many different types of people, the scientists specifically, scholars, biblical scholars, scholars of all kinds really, and those had to be some pretty interesting conversations. How was the evolution throughout those 38 years of the types of conversations and arguments you had with them?

A: I don’t know that I took people on. I really didn’t argue about it. I just pretty much listened. And I often felt like a loner, not a member of anything. I felt like an outcast. And when I came back to faith it was reading, it was personal reading and study and reflection. I really didn’t argue that much with anybody about it. I was concentrating on something that was really beyond argument. I didn’t talk myself back into the church, and nobody talked me back into it. I really pondered and read and delved deep in my soul and realized that the universe was speaking to me of God.

M: What about Stan? You say you guys got into many loving arguments specifically about the way things are in the world.

A: We would have a lot of arguments, that’s true. I did argue with Stan. Stan was a very militant atheist, and he really didn’t believe there was anything. And we did argue, but we would talk more on general topics. I really didn’t argue with him on the Catholic Church. I argued with him more about whether there was something beyond, whether we had souls that lived beyond life. We argued more like that. It was more general. And when I returned to the church I just went home and told him, after it was done, I didn’t consultant him. I just walked into the bedroom and said, “I’ve returned to the Catholic Church. It’s now required that we marry in the church. Would you be willing to do that?” and he thought for a moment and he said yes. And we were, within a week, married in my parish church by my cousin Father Jerry Laporte who is a Redemptorist priest there now.

M: St. Assumption?

A: St. Mary’s Assumption, yes.

M: What happened to you when you had Christopher? Did your thoughts of faith change at all at that point?

A: No, I don’t think my faith changed because of any birth or death or any incident. I think when you have a child of course that is a magnificent experience. And it is a wonderful experience, and also intensely painful physically, and you come out of it transformed. But I’m not sure that any experience led me back.

(Note: Anne and Stan had a daughter Michele who died of leukemia when she was 6 years old)

M: And Christopher grew up with no faith for much of his life?

A: Well he did, he grew up with no faith at all.

M: Did you ever speak to him about it or did he ever question religion in any context?

A: He never questioned us about wanting to be part of any religion, but when I was thinking of going back to the church I actually asked him. I said, “Do you believe in God?” And he told me he did. And I was very impressed with that fact. He was about 18 I guess. And I was amazed that he had been brought up with no religion at all and yet he believed in God. He had come to that decision on his own. And that helped me come to my decision.

M: And was it hard for you after that point- after you returned to the church – to know that Stan still didn’t believe? Or do you think that he ever did believe in his own way?

A: I think Stan was very close to God in his own way. I think that though he talked as an atheist what he really cared about in his heart of hearts was the truth and he had a very fine-tuned conscience and he had a great compulsion to live a good life and a conscience life. And for him art was really religion, his painting and his poetry.  And I felt that he was close to God because of those things. I really did feel that.  I felt that his sincerity was so perfect that I never doubted his salvation. And of course I have a great trust that God chooses ways of reaching everybody, and anybody and we don’t know what those ways are but God knows those ways. He gives everyone a chance, I think, everyone—everywhere.

M: I think it was in 1988 you had your first thought of returning to the church is that right?

A: well, not really. It wasn’t until 1998 that I actually returned, maybe a couple of years before that I began to think about it and ask questions.  I spend a lot of time questioning how could I go back to a religion that didn’t believe in this or didn’t believe in that. And what happened to me when I finally went back was I realized those questions didn’t matter, that God knew the answer to those questions.

M: And then you wanted the historical sense of Jesus and what happened and that’s when you became interested in writing about Christ?

A: Well I didn’t actually consecrate my work to Christ until about 4 years later. That was 2002, and that was a decision because I had been feeling the pressure to do something since I had returned. I returned in 1998 and I went back to church and it was very important to me and faith was very important to me. But I kept asking myself are you doing enough? What does it mean to be a Catholic? What does it mean to be a believer?

Really by 2002 I wanted to give all my work to Christ. I wanted to write for him. I wanted to write books about him and for him directly and on a certain Saturday afternoon in 2002 I made that commitment to write for him.

M: And never went back?

A: I never went back, no. And I knew that I would never go back. I began my research for Christ the Lord Out of Egypt and for Christ the Lord the Road to Cana. I didn’t know then that there would be 4 books. I thought then that it would be one big book about Jesus Christ and I did a lot of research. I really didn’t publish the first book until 2005, and to my utter amazement I only got the first 7 years of Jesus’ life into that novel. But I accomplished what I set out to do I think which was to write a very realistic novel about the Jesus in whom I believe who was both human and divine.

M: Do you think that your most recent works are different from what’s already out there about the life of Christ?

A: I hope so. I hope that everything I’ve written is original. I hope that each book has its own distinct voice. But I think these books are truly distinctive in that they are in the first person from the point of view of Jesus and yet they hold absolutely that he is god and that he is divine and human. I see my vocation really as to write hyperrealistic books about what Jesus’ life on earth might have been like and to stay within the confines of scripture. It’s quite a challenge but it’s wonderful, it’s really wonderful.

M: It’s funny to hear you talk about scripture because I grew up very similar to how you grew up, and I know in the Catholic Church, my parents-we didn’t have a Bible sitting around the house. I didn’t really experience that until college, which is exactly what you experienced as well. And now you’re having to research this scripture that perhaps you never had the foundation for when you were younger, regardless of your strict catholic background.

A: Well that was really true. I didn’t have any idea of the distinct voices of Mathew Mark, Luke and john. I had to read scripture over and over and over again until it stopped being inert and familiar and sprang to life as living story. That was the first thing I had to do and of course I read a lot of biblical commentary from skeptics and believers and a lot of that helped to understand the more difficult passages in scripture, and I’m still engaged in this. I’m still deeply engaged in study. I just started reading Pope Benedicts book on Jesus of Nazareth and it’s wonderfully helpful with regard to the sermon on the mound and the kingdom of god… themes that I’m dealing with in the novels that I’m writing.

M: What do you think about Pope Benedict so far?

A: I’m very admiring of Pope Benedict, and I’m particularly impressed with his book Jesus of Nazareth because I think he’s not only a great theologian but he’s a teacher and a rather gentle teacher. And this book is amazingly complex and yet written in a simple way and it’s very illuminating to me.   And I’ve also been reading his encyclicals, and he says very beautiful things in a very artful and simple way.  And I suspect that his visit to the United States is going to probably encourage people to read these books in greater numbers and that they’re gonna become more familiar with what he’s done here. Jesus of Nazareth is really a book that he wrote after becoming pope and it’s just quite impressive as you can see from my copy I have all kinds of notes and stuff that I’m making. And it’s really quite a terrific overview of scholarship on Jesus and it’s very helpful to me.

M: You say you think that his visit here will inspire.  I’m not sure if you are specifying Christians, or Americans in general.  I’m just wondering what you think of the importance and significance of his visit to America.

A: I think it’s very important to all of us American Catholics. I think it’s sort of thrilling. It’s our pope coming to America. I just watched him land at Andrews Air force base on television. And I just watched him being greeted by the president and the First Lady who have never gone out to Andrews Air force base to meet anyone. And they went out to meet him. And they met him and escorted him, and it was very beautiful to watch. I think it excites Catholics of all kinds when we see the pope. He has a very special meaning to us. He is our leader, the vigor of Christ on earth and he is the leader of the largest Christian religion on earth we have a billion members, and it’s always exciting to see him and I always think it has a unifying effect. It brings Catholics together … whatever they might be arguing about they drop and they go see the pope. Or they go watch the pope on television and they’re reminded of what really brings us all together rather than being reminded of what divides us. There are always things that divide us. There are always issues that divide us as Catholics and as Christians but again I think when we see him, we are inclined to think about what we have in common, what we all share, and why it’s a joy to see him come to our country.

M: What do you think is the most damaging issue he’s facing in today’s culture in Catholicism?

A: I think Catholics throughout America are very concerned about the pedophilia scandal and they’re looking to him for reassurance and I think he’s going to give us that reassurance that this will never happen again that this will continue to be investigated and that this is something that someday we can look back on as a terrible period that had a beginning and an end. And I think he wants to do that. I think he wants to express his personal concern over what happened and I think Catholics want that very much.

M: I guess you were away from the church during Vatican II, is that right?

A: I was

M: So do you look back now, because you experienced much of the Catholic Church growing up in Latin prior to Vatican II, Do you think that the church will have to have another sort-of reformation?

A: I think the church is always reforming itself. It’s always going through a process of reformation even if we don’t have a major church council. We are always confronting new problems. And what is unique about monotheism as was pointed out by a brilliant Jewish philosopher Alice Rifkin is that monotheists, we Jews and Christians, we go back to god again and again for creative solutions to our problems. That’s what makes us unique as a religion. We don’t see our god as a distant indifferent figure we see our lord as intimately involved with us. And so the church is always in that process in going to God, going to scripture, going to the wisdom of the saints going to council rooms, and discussing different questions. Whether it’s a big council like Vatican II or small councils that are going on every day, we are always going through that process. We have to. The church is made up of human beings.

M: What does your son think about your conversion back to Catholicism?

A: my son accepts my conversion and he knows I love him very much. He’s gay and a gay activist and a gay novelist and I’m very proud of him and we’re very close. So I don’t think there’s any problem between us about this at all. He accepts me completely as a catholic, and even now and then he goes to mass with me which gives me great joy.

M: Is it hard between you guys to accept some of the Catholic Church’s stance, or misinterpretation perhaps of homosexuality?

A: you know, I have hopes and I have dreams and my hopes and dreams are that these issues will be worked out, the voice of the Holy Spirit is always speaking. It’s never stopped speaking, and we are always reexamining what we believe. We’re not relativists we believe in absolutes but we are always reexamining our beliefs in terms of new knowledge. And I have hopes and dreams that we will become more tolerant of gay people as we find out more about them. But as a believing catholic it’s not my responsibility or my vocation to really try to change the church on this or to respond to what the church says. I mean the church right now is preaching compassion to gay people and that is a beautiful thing. That is certainly better than what they were preaching 50 years ago when they didn’t even want to talk about it. So I keep my hopes and my dreams and my catholic faith.

M: Back to your research, the latest research you’ve done in the past 5 plus years…. What did you find about the skeptics, the people who don’t believe in God, because I know you talked to them just as much as you talked to the theologians? Did you find their arguments convincing?

A: Not at all. I had grown up in the atheistic world kind of believing that the skeptics were right that the bible was a compilation of documents probably written by a church and that there was no real testimony there about what Jesus was or who he was and then when I sat down and actually began to read their books and read their studies, I discovered that it was a lot of speculation and a great deal of bias, and a great deal of antipathy for Christianity in new testament studies. And I found that the books that were written by believers like N.T. Wright the Bishop of Durham, or Raymond brown the great catholic scholar… I found those books far more convincing. Now the skeptics I think have played a very valuable role in New Testament research. They’ve made us think about our answers. They’ve raised questions, and then we’ve had to find the answers. But I was amazed at how flimsy the scholarship was and how unconvincing, and I was much more persuaded by the believers. And I didn’t expect that to be the case. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. You know the skeptical books get so much more attention in the popular press. They get so much more attention on television. When a skeptic comes out and says something inane about Jesus like probably he was left on the cross to be eaten by dogs.. that makes headlines. But there’s a great deal of scholarship going on by believers that’s very solid and very good, and we have very convincing evidence that the gospels were written extremely early and they are first person witness and they do contain the true words of Jesus. I found very compelling arguments for that and certainly that’s my understanding of the gospels as I approach my work.

M: Do you find that the media has been fair to you since you changed the focus of your work?

A: You know that’s an interesting question. I would say certainly the media has given me every chance to talk personally about my work on radio and on television. Now whether the books have been reviewed as much perhaps as they might have been if they were anti-Jesus I would have to say no. I think that books declaring that god doesn’t exist or that god is not good or there is no god, I think those books get a much better shake in the New York Times and in other newspapers. Books like mine that are affirming a belief in Jesus and a faith in Jesus and novels like mine that are trying to be more than novels are sometimes neglected by the press. So that would be my answer. The books that get the attention now are books like ‘god is not great’ by Christopher Hitchens. He’s the one that gets the breaks, but you know there are many books that aren’t reviewed in America. And there are many authors who complain about being dismissed but in answer to your question, books by a believer about Jesus, no they probably don’t get the media attention that they should.

M: Do you find that you’ve converted some of your vampire readers to Christianity?

A: I’ve certainly converted some people. I’ve been very blessed by getting a lot of emails from people who told me that because of my books they are going back to church. Now whether they were my readers before is not always clear because I get letters from all kinds of people. I get letters from people who read everything that I write including these new books on Jesus and I get scores of letters who are just discovering these works and never read my earlier works. So I’ve been very blessed I mean I’m getting wonderful feedback, wonderful, wonderful feedback. I would say for every negative letter there must be a hundred positive letters about the books. And interesting questions from people who want to know about why I chose to do this or that in my novel and is this archeologically correct or historically correct.  I got a couple of letters yesterday from readers who questioned my use of the word Palestine- the holy land in the first century. So I had to go look it up and find that the first century historians did indeed call it Palestine and I could write back in the email, yea go look at Philo of Alexandria he refers to it as that.

M: So you personally respond?

A: oh I try to read every email. I really do. Sometimes I can’t, I get behind but I try to stay current and to answer just about everybody if I possibly can.

M: Speaking of your novels, I’ve read conflicting information that first, when you converted back to Catholicism you said that you would never go back to writing about the vampires. Would you consider one last novel?

A: No. I don’t want to. I entertained the idea of maybe going back and writing a Christian novel in which Lestat my hero was saved. I thought about it, and I pondered it, and I got a lot of emails because I talked about it, and I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to go back to those books. I feel those books are a closed work for me. They’re finished. And I’m in this world now and I don’t want to enter back into that fantasy realm where vampires are real in order to write about salvation. I want to write about salvation in realistic novels. Historical novels yes, but realistic novels. And that’s really what I feel my vocation is. I feel my vocation is to talk about the humanity of Jesus and remind people perhaps of the humanity as well as the divinity.

M: On a different note, how do you like it here in the desert?

A: I love it here in the desert.  I really do. I love the weather, I’m a southern girl, I need the blue skies and the sunshine and I need the warmth and I really am very happy here. I’m living close enough to see my son all the time, he’s in west Hollywood but I’m also out here where it’s really warm and I think there are 360 blue sky days a year and that’s wonderful. We call this place little paradise in the desert, that’s my name for it. And it really is like a little paradise.

M: Do you go to church out here?

A: Oh yes definitely I go to mass every week. I go to a parish church in La Quinta that I’m very devoted to and I’m very much a member of that church and so are my two assistants who live here in the house with me. We all go to mass together.

M: St. Francis Assisi?

A: (nods) St. Francis Assisi in La Quinta. I’m very devoted to my Pastor James McLaughin.  I think he’s a wonderful priest.

M: I did want to go back to when you converted back to Catholicism, it was after you moved back to New Orleans and, of course you had a very strong Catholic family there at the time and you say you don’t think they judged you in any way. But you were fearful of that. Do you think that played a role in why you decided to convert back?

A: I certainly think being around them played a role but they never questioned me, they never attacked me for my atheism. They never criticized me. But certainly just seeing their example day in and day out, seeing what faith meant to them, what family meant to them, what their old catholic way of life meant to them, that was very inspiring and very comforting and I’m sure that had an influence.

M: Was there one particular thing that happened pushed you to know “I want to return”

A: I don’t think there was. I remember the afternoon I went back, and I remember just wanting to go back. And I remember thinking that the church was only a few blocks away, and I really believed that god was in that church, that Jesus was in that tabernacle, that the body and blood of Christ was there in the Holy Eucharist. And I really, really wanted to go back to Holy Communion. And I think it was that deep catholic belief and real presence of our Lord in that tabernacle that drew me back.

M: What do you think about the future of Catholicism?

A: I think of the famous line of Fulton Sheen. He said the church is a rock pitched into space. I remember hearing that when I was a little girl. He said it on the radio. And I pictured that rock pitched into space just traveling onward and onward and I think we will, the church will travel on and on until the message has reached all nations and all people on earth. And we have no way of knowing whether that will be several more thousand years or several hundreds years, we don’t know. But I think, just look at where we are now, I mean 2000 years have passed since Jesus walked the earth and we care as much about him today as anybody cared about him then. We care more about him today then they cared about him on Good Friday when they crucified him.

M: Do you think that women will be allowed to be ordained?

A: I dream of women’s ordination and frankly as a student of history, I think it will happen but again as a believing catholic I accept the position of the church at this time that it’s not possible. Again, as a student of history, I think it will come.

M: So you’ve only been in the presence of the pope once?

A: Yes that’s true, I was in the presence of the pope that Sunday many many years ago in St Peter’s square.

M: Would you like to meet Pope Benedict?

A: of course! I would love to meet Pope Benedict. It would be a great honor, it would be a wonderful thing.

M: Have you thought about it.

A: Maybe some day. I don’t travel a lot right now. Right now my vocation is really to stay home and write, to stay here and do my work. But of course if I get to travel again the place I would love to go is Italy and I would dream of being included in an audience with the Pope. That would be a wonderful thing if that could happen.

M: I do want to mention both books that I just received- obviously the Road to Cana, and the Memoirs as well which I found particularly fascinating because of my background. Is there anything in particular that you would like your readers to keep in mind? And we’ll start with Christ the Lord the Road to Cana, that they can expect when in reading it or that they should keep in mind while reading it?

A: I think the most important thing is I want them to know that they can trust me. That I am a believer in the Lord, and that what they read in that novel is in keeping with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That as hyperrealistic as it is, as much as it seeks to draw close to a probable day in Nazareth or a probable month or a probable winter, it is really a novel by a believer, and is really meant to affirm belief. It is really really meant to do that. Most of the emails I get are from people who say ‘when I saw your book Christ the lord I was shocked’ I thought you were the vampire lady. I didn’t know what you were gonna say about Jesus. But I bought your book, and boy am I glad I did. I’m surprised, I’m amazed, I loved it.” That’s wonderful but I always get that disclaimer at the beginning, not always but most of the time, that disclaimer that they were afraid maybe I wasn’t a believer. They were afraid maybe this was going to be blasphemy. They were afraid maybe this was going to be another last temptation of Christ. And I guess what I want people to know is that’s not so. When you pick this book up you’re gonna be picking up a book by a believer and of course I want to invite people to my website to see the many clergymen and the many scholars who have given me wonderful support on this book because Christians want to know this. You know Christians really want novels and films that they can enjoy. They want this now more than ever and they get it less than ever in America. In my childhood we had Ben Hur, we had the Ten Commandments, we had great big spectacular religious films. We don’t have those today. I mean very rarely does anyone come along and make a great religious film. Mel Gibson did it with the passion of the Christ. I want them to know that these books are written in the same spirit. That they are an attempt to write vital fiction that is totally Christian.  That’s what’s most important to me.

M: What did you think about The Passion?

A: I loved the passion of the Christ. I thought is was a magnificent film. I thought it was hyperrealism. I thought the production values were outstandingly high, I thought it could only be made by a believer like Mel Gibson who also knew how to make great movies. I thought it was great.

M: And then now to your memoir… why did you decide to write this?

A: I had included and authors note in Christ the lord out of Egypt my first book and I found that people responded very strongly to the authors note and over and over again they asked to know about my own conversion story and my own journey with faith. And I thought in writing this memoir I could answer those questions. And also I guess I wanted to do it for myself. I wanted to tell the story of what it had been like to be catholic in the 40s and 50s and what it had been like to lose faith and to return to it. And that’s what I’ve done in the memoir.

M: And do you find that the people of New Orleans still have the same attitude toward Catholicism that they did during the time in which you grew up there?

A: I think they do. I mean people of New Orleans they really celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and St. Joseph’s Day and maybe they don’t go out for the may processions as much as they used to but when I was a child but church is very much a part of their lives. And even though the big churches in the inner city of New Orleans are sometimes half empty, the suburban churches of New Orleans are packed every Sunday. And I think Catholicism is very much a part of New Orleans. I think it’s a city of Irish and Italian and German Catholics and many other kinds of Catholics as well.

M: Do you see New Orleans rebuilding stronger after Katrina or at all?

A: I haven’t been back to New Orleans since the storm but I hear every day from people every day from people in New Orleans, and I think they are definitely rebuilding. Sometimes they have to do it by digging into their own savings and their own pockets because they’re not getting the help from the government, and they’re not getting the help from the insurance companies that they perhaps should get, but they are rebuilding and they’re working at it very courageously and certainly many many many hundreds of thousands of people are there because they love to be there no matter what the circumstances. You know, when you love New Orleans, you love New Orleans. And there’s nothing like missing it. I mean the songs barely capture the pain. You know, do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? It’s terrible.