What did Anne Rice’s Catholic background give her.
What was the worst thing your Catholic background gave you?
The terror of Hellfire and damnation, and the fear of sex. I grew up in a very repressive time (1940s and 1950s) in a very Catholic and Southern city, and I think it is fair to say the Catholicism of my girlhood was obsessed with sex—that we not sin; that we not put ourselves in the occasion of sin; that we fear our natural urges; that we save ourselves uncompromisingly for the Catholic procreative marriage bed; that we condemn and turn away from all sexual exploration, sexual fantasies, sexual longings; that we be at war forever with our physical nature in the name of only one sexual good, the Catholic married life. I grew up in a time when the church privileged the celibate life of the convent or the priesthood high above marriage, and made this clear to all of us. I have never gotten over the repression of this upbringing or the fear of Hell intermixed with it—the idea that sex was filthy, evil, something of the Devil, and involved the worst sins one could commit, the insistence that Hell was the place for those who gave in to sexual sin. I can still remember sermons on Hell, the talk of Hell. I do not believe in Hell but I live in terror of it to this day. I live in terror of a God who would create and sustain such a place. From interview in the americamagazine.