Now that the shouting about The Da Vinci Code has died down a little, it’s time to start asking ourselves what this whole episode really means for the Church. Even allowing for all the carefully contrived hype, the fact that a potboiler novel and a movie crafted for commercial success could give rise to so much consternation and concern on the part of serious people is extraordinary in itself. What’s going on?
Three lessons in particular seem to stand out.
Lesson number one: The entertainment industry — a term which these days takes in not just Hollywood but formerly respectable sectors of the book publishing world — no longer has any hesitation in trashing Christianity and insulting Christian belief.
For whatever reason — greed, hostility to religion, or some combination of both — the industry has become a willing accomplice of the ongoing war against faith. It is symptomatic of what's happened that even the venerable National Geographic should have taken a hand in flogging Christianity by plugging the Gnostic “Gospel of Judas” a while back.
It's a war all right, but on the battlefield of popular culture — where the war is largely being fought — religion no longer has any really effective weapons to defend itself. Acting in a haze of post-Vatican II benevolence, Church authorities killed off the Legion of Decency 40 years ago. Bill Donohue and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights do a commendable job, but nothing has taken the Legion's place.
Lesson number two: Going far to make this bad situation worse is the religious illiteracy of many readers of the book and viewers of the film. The New York Times quotes one such moviegoer:
“The Catholic Church has hidden a lot of things — proof about the actual life of Jesus, about who wrote the Bible. All these people — the famous Luke, Mark and John — how did they know so much about Jesus' life? If there was a Bible, who created it and how many times has it been changed?”
The Times attributes these remarks to a 25-year-old associate director of a Bronx senior center — a Catholic who, according to the newspaper, “was baptized and confirmed in the Church, went to Sunday school for six years, and still attends Mass twice a month.” Need I say more?
Lesson number three: As all the world knows, The Da Vinci Code is based on the premise that the Catholic Church has engaged in a huge deception and cover-up about Christ from the start. The success of the book and movie means some people are willing to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy the story they tell while others more or less credit the grotesque tale.
Reactions like the one quoted above testify not only to gross ignorance arising from a scandalous failure of religious education, but to a massive collapse of trust in the Church for which ignorance provides dangerously fertile soil.
While this crisis of trust has many sources, one of them almost certainly is the fallout from the sex abuse scandal. Some people — including not a few Catholics — use skepticism and mistrust of the Church as rationalizations for their own dishonesties of the intellect and the flesh. In other cases, though, the skepticism and mistrust are lingering reactions generated by grave offenses against openness and accountability on the part of religious authorities stretching back many years.
This airhead movie and the book that spawned it have no significance at all as art, literature, or history. But as symptoms of a complex sickness, they matter a lot.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, DC. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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