Catholic World News News Feature

Code success shows religious ignorance, prelates say May 10, 2006

The spectacular success of The Da Vinci Code reflects a widespread ignorance about the Christian faith, a Vatican cardinal suggested to a Roman audience on May 10.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, spoke about religious illiteracy during a conference on Christianity and literature. While the French prelate did not explicitly mention the novel by Dan Brown or the forthcoming film by director Ron Howard, the main target of his remarks was clear as he spoke to a conference on fantasy and reality in literature.

The cardinal might also have been thinking of the Harry Potter books as he spoke about "fantastic novels" in the English language which have "massively conquered the market and the attention of readers," while drawing on themes taken from the worlds of art, history, and religion and "the quest for the sacred and the mysterious." Such novels, he said, often appear very quickly in film, and command huge audiences and enormous profits. In fact, Cardinal Poupard continued, because of the profits they generate, these fantasies sometimes tempt producers to violate "the most elementary rules of common sense."

In response to these marketing phenomena, the cardinal said, Christians should recognize the stark difference between the vision of the Church presented in these novels and the Christian understanding. In fact, he said, anyone familiar with the history of the Church should recognize that such negative portrayals are not a new development.

The success of the works today, Cardinal Poupard said, reflects a "religious ignorance, a plain ignorance" that in turn shows "the absence of a basic culture." Readers who lack a fundamental knowledge of Christianity, and of their own cultural history, are vulnerable to the appeal of the new books.

For the faithful, the cardinal continued, the popularity of The Da Vinci Code should be recognized as an opportunity, and if Christians respond intelligently, there may be new openings to provide an accurate understanding of the faith and of Church history.

Cardinal Poupard was one of three Vatican prelates to speak on May 10 about the need for a prudent Christian response to the release of the film version of The Da Vinci Code. Cardinals José Saraiva Martins and Julian Herranz-- the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and the president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, respectively-- said that Catholics should counteract the "disinformation" in Dan Brown's novel with accurate information about the Church.

Cardinal Herranz-- a member of Opus Dei, an organization that is subjected to particularly negative treatment in Brown's novel-- said that he is "optimistic" that the effect of The Da Vinci Code will eventually "boomerang." The Spanish cardinal disclosed that he himself had become interested in Opus Dei on the basis of a negative article about the prelature published in 1949, "with a content similar to the writings of Dan Brown." He said that the release of the film, with the new attention drawn to the book, should be an opportune moment "to invite people to use their intelligence to search for the truth."