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THE Vatican has appointed a top cardinal to rebut what it says are the lies, distortions and errors in Dan Brown’s bestselling thriller The Da Vinci Code.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa and a possible successor to the Pope, immediately took up the fight yesterday by claiming that the novel was a deliberate attempt to discredit the Roman Catholic Church through absurd and vulgar falsifications.
At the heart of the book is the notion that the Church has for centuries concealed the fact that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, a former prostitute, and that she bore him a child.
The appointment of Cardinal Bertone, 70, is a clear sign that the Vatican has been rattled by the continuing worldwide success of Brown’s thriller, which has sold 18 million copies in 44 languages in just two years. It is still among the top ten bestsellers in the United States, France, Brazil and Argentina — all countries with huge Catholic populations — and Britain.
The cardinal said that the book reminded him of intemperate anti-clerical pamphlets of the 19th century. He will seek to debunk the conspiracy theories at the heart of the plot in a string of public debates on the work beginning in Genoa tomorrow.
He said he was distressed to discover that even Catholic bookshops were selling the book. “We are clearly facing a formidable distribution strategy here,” he said.
"…His latest task is “to unmask the lies” so that readers can see how “shameful and unfounded” the book is. One of his first steps will be to debunk the suggestion that the Church has become male dominated and has buried its feminine side, Cardinal Bertone told Il Giornale newspaper. “In fact the female element is ever present in the Gospels, not least in the person of the Virgin Mary.”
He insisted that the trial, death and resurrection of Christ were indisputable. Evidence, he said, came from the accounts of disciples who, as former fishermen, were hard-headed realists. He accused Brown of relying on apocryphal texts that had been excluded from the biblical canon precisely because they were imaginative.
“He even perverts the story of the Holy Grail, …"
timesonline.co.uk/article/0,11069-1525702,00.html
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa and a possible successor to the Pope, immediately took up the fight yesterday by claiming that the novel was a deliberate attempt to discredit the Roman Catholic Church through absurd and vulgar falsifications.
At the heart of the book is the notion that the Church has for centuries concealed the fact that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, a former prostitute, and that she bore him a child.
The appointment of Cardinal Bertone, 70, is a clear sign that the Vatican has been rattled by the continuing worldwide success of Brown’s thriller, which has sold 18 million copies in 44 languages in just two years. It is still among the top ten bestsellers in the United States, France, Brazil and Argentina — all countries with huge Catholic populations — and Britain.
The cardinal said that the book reminded him of intemperate anti-clerical pamphlets of the 19th century. He will seek to debunk the conspiracy theories at the heart of the plot in a string of public debates on the work beginning in Genoa tomorrow.
He said he was distressed to discover that even Catholic bookshops were selling the book. “We are clearly facing a formidable distribution strategy here,” he said.
"…His latest task is “to unmask the lies” so that readers can see how “shameful and unfounded” the book is. One of his first steps will be to debunk the suggestion that the Church has become male dominated and has buried its feminine side, Cardinal Bertone told Il Giornale newspaper. “In fact the female element is ever present in the Gospels, not least in the person of the Virgin Mary.”
He insisted that the trial, death and resurrection of Christ were indisputable. Evidence, he said, came from the accounts of disciples who, as former fishermen, were hard-headed realists. He accused Brown of relying on apocryphal texts that had been excluded from the biblical canon precisely because they were imaginative.
“He even perverts the story of the Holy Grail, …"
timesonline.co.uk/article/0,11069-1525702,00.html
