The Da Vinci Code

Who Is
this Man?
This unexpressed question lies at the core of the phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code, with its over 50 million copies sold throughout the world. The book’s response, based–as multiple sources underline–on obvious falsities, contests the truth of the Gospels, and denies the foundation of Christianity: Christ’s Resurrection. But, having done so, what does it leave man? Just a vague spiritualism that has very little to do with life and the fundamental questions of existence. This is why, as the Pope said, we need to reaffirm the concreteness of our faith. Traces offers three contributions toward a judgment

by Carlo Dignola

“When Tom Hanks said to Audrey Tautou, “So, then, you’re the last descendent of Christ,” the audience broke into laughter at the Cannes Film Festival, during world premier of the “event” of the year, the film version of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s bestseller (50 million copies). Even so, it seems that dim-witted Forrest Gump is not the only one credulous enough to get excited about the sacred text “made in New Hampshire.” According to surveys, there are those who believe the novel’s thesis: that Jesus married Mary Magdalene–though who knows, maybe it was just a civil union–and that their descendents still roam the world; that Leonardo da Vinci knew it all and left esoteric messages encrypted in his paintings; and that the Church has been covering this up for two thousand years as very bad news, hiding and obfuscating it not because of sexual mores, but to protect and assert its own worldly power. According to the book, original, feminist, feel-good Christianity was perverted in fourth century Rome by Emperor Constantine, a born-again Christian, an ante litteram Bush, if you will, twisting it into a virile and homicidal institution bent only on perpetuating its own temporal dominion. Today, its armed wing (and also its perfidious mind) is allegedly Opus Dei. In the Church, there have been reactions expressing concern. But Cardinal Camillo Ruini, President of the Italian Episcopal Conference, while condemning “an editorial and cinematographic fashion whose primary goal is commercial, but that also constitutes a radical and entirely unfounded contestation of the very heart of our faith,” also said that the “Da Vinci phenomenon” is actually “an opportunity, an occasion for engaging in a comprehensive work to provide accurate information on the history of the Church.”

Prêt-à-porter faiths
The poet T.S. Eliot asked, “Has mankind failed the Church, or has the Church failed mankind?” Both, Fr. Giussani responded in his 2004 interview with Roberto Fontolan for RAI (Italian state television): “The Church began to abandon humanity, I think, we think, because she forgot who Christ is. She was ashamed of Christ, of saying who Christ is.” And in the world of Christianity, in effect, many no longer know who He is. Nor are these cultural operations innocent and isolated. The National Geographic Society has financed (with huge sums) the restoration and publication of the gnostic Gospel of Judas, in which Jesus asks the Apostle to betray Him, promising him the Kingdom of Heaven, assuring him that he is the best of the Twelve. There is also talk of a secret Gospel of Mark, and of ever-more-frequent findings in the Middle East of apocrypha, papyruses, and epigraphs that supposedly contradict the canonical Gospels.
This all brings to mind Fr. Giussani’s insistence fifteen years ago on the authenticity of the Gospels. His saying that the tiny Greek Qumran 7Q5 fragment (dated 68 AD) demonstrated that the Gospel of Mark is not a late “environment” reconstruction like the gnostic Gospels of the third and fourth centuries, but the concise recording of a direct witness, the eyes and lips of Peter, was not just the punctilious obstinacy of a biblical scholar. The battle in the early 1990s against gnosticism–the attempt to substitute the concrete faith of the Church with the more refined one of a circle of intellectuals–was the right battle. Maybe just somewhat ahead of its time.

Royal descendents
The Pope, at a recitation of the Regina Coeli in Saint Peter’s Square, while newspapers were stirring up the controversy, said something splendidly succinct: he simply reiterated that Christ is risen, that His body and blood are alive in the Church. “The Resurrection is the central datum of Christianity, the fundamental truth to be reaffirmed vigorously in every age, because denying it, as has happened and continues to happen in various ways, or transforming it into a purely spiritual event, would make our faith in vain.” So then, Dan Brown wasn’t all wrong: there are descendents of Jesus who are still mysteriously wandering around the world, unnoticed by most; there really is a sang réal that has been perpetuating its line for two thousand years, but not the one protected by the Priory of Zion imagined by the ex-pianist/singer of Exeter.
All things considered, this hullabaloo will also bring about something positive: many will begin to ask just who this Jesus is that half the world’s talking about.