I am unsure where exactly to post my question or should i say my concerns. Anyway, i recently read a book entitled The Third Secret by Steve Berry. I would just like to ask if anyone has read it and what was their reaction to it. Although it was a work of fiction I was upset and offended by it.
Hi.
I’m reading through Berry’s
The Templar Legacy and just scanned an Amazon review of the book you mention.
Like Dan Brown, Berry appears to pull his characters into improbable actions and reactions based on worldly events, but also takes an actual institution and twists its meaning significantly to the point where the institution is a fictionalized. That is, for the sake of fiction he makes people and the Church into something it is not: power-mad or basing itself on “long-kept secrets or falsehoods.”
As suspense goes, Berry’s not a bad writer. But, yes, in my opinion, you are justified in your reaction to Berry’s take on the Church as just another Christian tradition that bends with every wind of cultural change. I’ll still finish my Berry book I have (which was free, thankfully) but I do have beefs about authors that take historical and actual organizations and mis-characterize them for fiction’s sake. There’s a way to make good, suspenseful Catholic fiction without making a mockery of the faith.
I haven’t read it yet, but perhaps you should pick up Pierce Paul Read’s
The Death of a Pope, which plays on the human element of the Church but doesn’t pull the theology of the Church into some scary pretzel.
