Da Vinci Code: A liberty with facts?

by Editor · April 6, 2005

The book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown has become a cultural phenomenon that may yet come to help define the present decade.

Alas, it may have a harmful effect on credulous readers who may be seduced by his claims of scrupulous research. Those who fall for Mr Brown’s fiction may well acquire a very distorted view of the Catholic Church and the Gospel it preaches.

It is deplorable that some unwary readers actually believe and even base their view of Christianity on the absurdity that Jesus married Mary Magdalen, a fantasy presented in Mr Brown’s fiction as a documented “fact” which the Church supposedly has tried to suppress.

The problem with Mr Brown’s book rests on his claim that the content of his story is not all fiction, that some of it is based on historical fact, while blurring the lines between fantasy and historicity.

There has been some persuasive debunking of Mr Brown’s claim of painstaking research, in at least ten books and in many newspaper and magazine articles (such as that by Fr Michael Austin SJ, published in The Southern Cross of March 9-15).

One such book, De-Coding Da Vinci by Amy Welborn, said the novel comprises “a number of different strands of speculation, esoteric lore, and pseudo-history published in other books.”

Tellingly, the errors in Mr Brown’s book begin with the title, which accurately should have read “The Leonardo Code”, because the Renaissance artists of da Vinci’s time were known and referred to by their Christian names only.

So much for the notion of historical research.

There would have been little cause for objections save for the subjective perception of an anti-Catholic bias had Mr Brown weaved his doubtlessly thrilling yarn around solid research without making any claims of authenticity. In doing so, he would have followed the example of novelists such as Frederick Forsythe. Of course, such ethics would have been unhelpful in creating the cultish hype that has led to the book’s bestselling status.

Clearly, the author has taken liberties with facts and untruths, creating a book that in effect slanders the Church.

It is not wise, however, to call for a Catholic boycott of The Da Vinci Code, as Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone of Genoa did last month (he has since moderated his remarks slightly).

Cardinal Bertone’s comments apart from feeding the hype foster a false perception that the Church is still in the business of banning books, or at least prescribing literary directives to the faithful.

The marketing of the book certainly played on the perceived secretiveness of the Catholic Church, coinciding with the fall-out from the sex abuse scandals in the United States.

When Cardinal Bertone claims anti-Catholicism, however, he plays straight into the publishers’ hands, as though the novel contains information the Church is still trying to conceal.

Instead, the popularity of the book should be seen as an excellent catechetical opportunity to teach Church history to people whose appetite for it will have been whetted by Mr Brown’s book, to correct long-standing misconceptions about the Church, and to encourage a return to the proper source material of the Christian faith: the holy Bible.