Thoughts on the "Da Vinci Code"

`Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false,' says a character in Dan Brown's bestseller, The Da Vinci Code - a good rounded assertion, and one liable to produce a certain amount of reaction from committed Christians.

Father Michael Marett-Crosby, the assistant parish priest of the Catholic parish in St Helier in Jersey, was asked: `Is there anything more to the book apart from being a piece of entertaining fiction?

`To treat it as anything other than light and ephemeral fiction is to make a fundamental mistake,' he replied, ‘but as a fictional story it is absolutely fine. Only if it is used as a guide to things of the faith and things of the Church could it become dangerous.'

The novel opens with the murder of a curator of the Louvre. An American professor of religious symbolism is enmeshed in the crime, together with the victim's granddaughter and a millionaire historian of the esoteric history of Christianity. Together they flee Paris for London, one step ahead of both the police and of a mad monk from Opus Dei....

But surely Opus Dei doesn't have monks? No, but never mind, the author never lets awkward facts get in the way of a good story.

Neither does he let a good story get in the way of the ‘history’ contained within it, which is that there is another, secret, story of Jesus contained in Gospels long `suppressed' by the Church in a grand conspiracy.

Fr Marett-Crosby said: `That is a good example of fact and imagination combining. It is correct that there are other books with the title `Gospel' that circulated in early Christianity, but they were written within semi-Christian gnostic sects. But these did not ``disprove'' Christian divinity - on the contrary, they claimed to disprove his humanity.

‘They were written for tiny audiences. They were never ``suppressed'', they were just never read.

`And the achievement of the Council of Nicea in 325 AD was not suppressing the humanity of Jesus, but reacting to the body of opinion that claimed that He was only divine, and not properly human as well.

`As a piece of serious history, the Da Vinci Code is bunkum. A crucial mistake is to assume that it describes a serious conspiracy to hide the truth about the origins of Christianity. There are so many historical errors that the book cannot be taken as fact.'

There was no evidence whatsoever for a secret marriage or liaison between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, as claimed, or for a child subsequently hidden in France. The oldest legends regarding this only date back to the Middle Ages.

What of the description of Opus Dei?

`Not only do they have no monks, but it is not ``a sect'', and it is not clandestine, only a movement of deeply committed lay people seeking to live an authentic vocation of holiness in the world. There is legitimate room for different views on it - the Jesuits and the Dominicans have also been attacked in the past.'

And the ``suppression of the sacred feminine''?

He replied: `This is a claim from someone who seems to be unaware of Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary .

`Controversy is good for religion. Our worst enemy is apathy. If The Da Vinci Code raises questions, that is for the good. But fiction is not the right medium for seeking answers, and fiction purporting to be fact should be true to the history it tells.

‘Let's not confuse good fiction with good fact.'

Alasdair Crosby
Jersey Evening Post