Warning: if you plan on reading Don Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” or seeing the Ron Howard movie, and aren’t familiar with the plot, the following contains spoilers. In fact, I give away the whole bloody thing before I’m done. Take THAT, Dan Brown!

Da Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown’s body lies a smolderin’ in the Nave

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
5/8/06
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Religious/davinci.htm

It’s Dan Brown’s fault that I haven’t done a Paulie Five Fingers story this month. My storyline has sectarian violence breaking out around Mt. Shasta after another character from that universe, Artie the Pearl, discovers and translates a new gospel, one which clearly states that Jesus survives the crucifixion, marries Mary Magdalene and they both truck off to England and live on the prime meridian.

Hmm. Not only have I witnesses that I was working on that before I read the “DaVinci Code,” but I wrote some of it even before the cartoon riots in Europe. No, I stole the idea fair and square from some books I read in the seventies, one a Gore Vidal tome about Constantine (“Julian the Apostate”), and the other about a new gospel emerging that had Jesus surviving the crucifixion. The idea of sectarian violence in our relatively serene village stemmed from an awareness that most religious nut cases tend towards violence in the name of peace, love and understanding.

So maybe the idea wasn’t original to me. But the story track I laid out was, to my dismay, a little TOO close to Dan Brown’s, and I didn’t want to have to sue the man for plagiarism. So I’m reworking the storyline some.

Of course, anyone who believes that I really hang out in Mt. Shasta with a mob boss and a demented cryptographic genius needs to be assured that is absolutely ridiculous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dismiss the very possibility, and never consider it again.

So I’ll do a little rewriting and have the next P5F story sometime in the next month or so. But I’ll miss Sofie, the Teacher, and the giant albino monk. Some of my most inspired writing, let me tell you. I guess I better change the title, too. “Paulie and the Leonardo Code” sang to me, but as I said, I don’t want to have to sue Dan Brown. No, on second thought, I’ll keep the giant albino monk. He’s a large Samoyed dog, you see. Named Monk. Do your worst, Dan Brown’s lawyers!

Now, “The Da Vinci Code” spent three years in the New York Time’s top twenty hardback fiction list, and fell off that list just this week only because the paperback came out. It’s currently the bestseller. When it came to deciding to read the book, I was a little behind the curve on that one.

Closing in on 50,000,000 copies sold, and with a movie coming out next week by Ron Howard starring Tom Hanks. That 50 million was nearly all hardbacks, which meant people were plopping down $50 to read it. More for the illustrated version.

Well, people want a little pagan mystery in their lives. Look at how many copies of the “Harry Potter” series have sold. People enjoy mysteries and strange magicks and the like.

Of course, some of the local conspiracy theorists, those whose lives are populated by Freemasons and Illuminati and International Bankers, had opinions. Most utterly hated the book, but I’ve long since learned that nothing gets a conspiracy theorist angrier than encountering someone with a slightly different conspiracy theory. Lifeblood feuds rage over minute points that are invisible to me. Conspiracy theorists are a lot like religionists and movie critics that way.

So I read the book carefully, acutely aware that this whodunnit/chase mystery was exerting enormous influence upon millions of people.

It’s a fun read. It’s what one of the Weasels calls “a fast read,” which is an apt description. It took me a couple of weeks to finish it, but that’s because I usually tend to be reading four or five different books at any given time. Brown pulls a lot of rabbits out of his hat during the story, a device that often gets tiresome if used too often, but he does it well enough that one’s reaction is “Oh, I should have seen that one.” I groaned and slapped my head when the second five-letter code was revealed at Newton’s grave. I had my own elegant and irrefutable theory about the missing orb (I came up with “pluto”) but I was completely wrong.

Some of the stuff in the book is demonstrably real (the figure sitting next to Jesus in “The Last Supper” certainly looks female to me), and some is pure bull. The “Priori of Sion” for instance, didn’t exist until a somewhat unbalanced Frenchmen devised the existence of the organization a mere 100 years ago, according to a “60 Minutes” piece done last week. Sion, far from being the location in Jerusalem, was merely the name of the hill next to where the Frenchman lived.

Other items may be historically accurate, but exaggerated for effect. While it’s indisputable that the Church persecuted what it called “witches” throughout the middle ages, the number of killed, five million, seems awfully high, even spread over 600 years. Keep in mind that Europe’s entire population then was in the tens of millions – usually the LOW tens of millions.

And let’s face it: if the church was as all-powerful and as deeply committed to wiping out heretical thoughts as it said it was back then, Protestantism wouldn’t exist. It’s been many centuries since the Church was more powerful than any other authority in Europe.

Opus Dei exists, of course, and it’s more than a little disturbing that two Supreme Court justices are members. I always tend to think of John Kennedy Toole’s brilliant “A Confederacy of Dunces” when I read of the group, since his central character, like Opus Dei, advocated a return to the rigid and ultra-authoritarian Church of the middle ages. I leave it to the reader to determine how submitting to the will of the church meshes with being a judge in a secular nation. Opus Dei is growing in membership as the Church as a whole loses members, but most of their gain comes at the expense of the church – the hard core, rigid fundies who have been whining about the disease of liberalism since Vatican II. There’s no doubt in my mind that it seeks greater secular power, and will be brutal and authoritarian if it should ever gain it.

But the Catholic Church has decided to go on the offensive against the phenomenon of the Da Vinci Code, and here’s the spoiler: the Church aren’t the bad guys in the novel. They, like the protagonists, are duped and manipulated by a shadowy figure called “The Teacher.” The Church’s role in Brown’s book is actually small, and relatively benign.

So I was astonished today to read a release from Cardinal Francis Arinze which read, in part, “Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget [...] Those who blaspheme Christ and get away with it are exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us. There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking. They will make it painfully clear to you.”

Looks like without actually coming right out and saying so, the Cardinal has issued a fatwa against Dan Brown. In effect, he’s saying, “Don’t act like the idiots who did the cartoon riots, but remember that the option is available.”

Keep in mind that Arinze isn’t just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill asshole Vatican cardinal. This goombah is considered the odds-on favorite to be the next Pope if Ratzo up and kicks the bucket in the next ten years or so, as Popes are wont to do. (Most are have one foot in the grave when they get the job, and a surprising number of them have died from rat poison in their Papal Kibble).

Arinze isn’t just pulling a Bill O’Reilly here: he isn’t going to be saying stuff like that without the full connivance of the Church and their explicit authorization to do so. The Vatican is demonstrably impatient with loose cannons. Or canons.

I don’t have a dog in that fight. If Dan Brown took haphazard facts and a well-explored storyline to create an enduring work of fiction, well, so did the Catholic Church. And it may be nothing more than the Church defending its own fantasies.

But oh, my! If you think the conspiracy theorists were all riled up BEFORE, just wait!