I personally hated the Da Vinci Code, but it just never seems to stop getting people’s panties in a bunch. The latest high-profile panty-bunching is occuring deep within the ranks of the Catholic Church. If you haven’t read the novel, first of all it’s cheesy. Second, it points a lot of fingers at the Catholic Church as having some kind of conspiracy to cover up the truth about the historical Jesus. So it’s only logical - in one sense - that the Vatican would react, because the immense popularity of the novel threatens their version control over the story-system upon which their legitimacy is founded.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa and a possible successor to the Pope, has been appointed by the Vatican to rebut what the Catholic church calls the “shameful and unfounded errors” contained within The Da Vinci Code. He is organising a series of public debates focusing on the conspiracy theories and what the Vatican sees as the blurring of fact and fiction at the heart of the thriller, the first of which will be held in Genoa tomorrow.

The weird part is that the book merely covers old ground though - alternate versions of the Christ mythos that have been around since it was originally spawned. Dan Brown merely dredges them up (haphazardly) for a modern audience.

In one way though, this is kind of a cool event that is being played out in society with this novel. It proves just how even fictional stories can have as much or impact on events than actual events. It’s a great example of a ton of different things I will be talking about in my Story-Systems site.

It also reminds me a little bit of Dan Quayle’s battles with the fictional tv character Murphy Brown in the early 90’s - although there is debate over whether Quayle actually knew it was only a tv show.

This article ends in a completely hilarious and highly ironic twist. A Catholic author, Greg Watts, is quoted as saying:

“Dan Brown’s concern is to make money rather than teach theology. He has found a gullible audience and has played on their ignorance,” he says. “He gives the readers the impression that they understand Christianity when in fact they’ve been hoodwinked and manipulated.”

The beauty part is that this not only accurately describes Dan Brown’s novel, but could be applied without hesitation to the entire Catholic Church itself. God, if this isn’t the very definition of organized religion, then I don’t know what is. They’ve always chased after money, played on and promoted people’s ignorance, and totally fooled people about just what the nature of Christ’s message really was. In that sense, Dan Brown’s novel is more Catholic than anybody’s really giving it credit for.