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‘Da Vinci’ proves Catholic
archived from: 2006-04-27
by: Craig Maier

This week, as part of a series attempting to understand “The Da Vinci Code” phenomenon, the Pittsburgh Catholic will examine how the book and the movie come from the tradition of anti-Catholic pop culture. Seeing Dan Brown’s book for what it is — an anti-Catholic pulp novel — can help Catholics understand why it says what it says and why it has become so popular.

“Oh,” she said, looking at the copy of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” on my desk. “Have you read it? I couldn’t put it down!”

She was visiting my office on business, and she probably would have been startled that I wasn’t exactly reading Dan Brown’s bestseller for pleasure, but more like how scientists at the Centers for Disease Control study the Ebola virus.

Millions of people have read the novel. Millions more will see the movie version starring Tom Hanks when it comes out in a few weeks. Between the two, almost an entire generation will be exposed to what is, in fact, an anti-Catholic message. Yet, as big as “The Da Vinci Code” has become, the phenomenon really is only the most recent episode in a long story of anti-Catholic propaganda in popular American culture.

“The Da Vinci Code” follows the story of an American professor as he unravels a plot that, the book alleges, the Catholic Church has spent millennia concealing. In a nutshell: Jesus Christ, it turns out, was just a nice guy who married Mary Magdalene and taught free love and New Age spirituality. And, as it turns out, the Catholic Church, because it allegedly hated both sexuality and women, conspired to suppress what “really happened.”

As the story unfolds, we learn that the Holy Grail, thought by many to be the legendary chalice sought by King Arthur, isn’t a chalice at all but the proof that would expose the church’s plot to cover up the real story of Jesus.

In Brown’s book, two members of the Catholic organization Opus Dei — a rogue bishop and a masochistic albino assassin — ruthlessly attempt to recover this truth to protect the church. Others, including the book’s heroes, race to get there first.

As the American professor evades the authorities, the Opus Dei assassin and others, “truths” about the church, the sacraments and fundamental Christian beliefs are “exposed.” In the process, we find that everything Catholics believe is a lie carefully constructed to preserve the church’s power.

The controversy surrounding “The Da Vinci Code” is unique in that it has triggered responses from American Christians of all denominations. Evangelical Christians, in particular, have argued that the book’s depictions of Jesus and Mary Magdalene are anti-Christian, and they blame modern society’s wholesale rejection of Christianity for the book’s popularity.

But “The Da Vinci Code” is also undeniably anti-Catholic. All of the Christian characters are Catholic, and as far as the book seems to be concerned, Catholicism is the only Christian faith in the world. It also paints a sensationalized and distorted picture of Catholicism: meaningless sacraments and rituals, sexually dysfunctional and masochistic clergy, and a power-hungry, venial institutional church.

The anti-Catholic arguments in “The Da Vinci Code,” however, aren’t new. American culture has been immersed in anti-Catholic sentiment from the beginning, says Robert Lockwood, the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s director for communications and a longtime observer of anti-Catholicism in modern life.

Anti-Catholic arguments like the ones made in Brown’s novel are part of what Lockwood calls the American “cultural DNA.” After centuries of being repeated from pulpits, newspaper cartoons and the halls of government, he says, even some truly outlandish allegations about what the church is and what Catholics believe have become “common sense” for many Americans. “The Da Vinci Code” touches on ideas that have lingered in the public mind from the start of American history.

The anti-Catholic tradition

Understanding how those ideas got there involves placing “The Da Vinci Code” in a long tradition of anti-Catholic propaganda going back to the very start of the Reformation. English Protestants in particular denounced Catholicism and used every medium available to do it. In addition to the theological diatribes issuing from pulpits, bizarre stories began to be circulated about what the Catholic Church “really” was.

According to Lockwood, these stories involved two interrelated themes. First, the stories asserted that Catholic beliefs were not only untrue, but also known to be untrue by church leadership itself. The church was, therefore, hypocritical and duplicitous, full of sexually perverse priests, worthless sacraments and superstitious laity who were oppressed by power-hungry bishops willing to do anything to maintain the secret.

The second theme was the conspiracy myth. From the beginning of anti-Catholic propaganda, Catholics — Jesuits in particular — were considered a “secret society” always plotting to conceal truths, overthrow governments and wreak general havoc. When Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, was caught in a failed attempt to blow up the British Parliament in 1605, the myth of the “Catholic conspiracy” seemed to be confirmed, and it has recurred ever since. In “The Da Vinci Code,” Brown simply exchanges the conniving Jesuits of 17th century English Reformation lore with a contemporary Opus Dei.

When the Puritans came to America in 1620, they brought their anti-Catholic lore with them. By the 19th century, those myths had been woven into a complete anti-Catholic worldview. For millions of Americans since, Catholicism became a shadowy conspiracy that they believed threatened to overthrow American democracy, and the millions of Catholic immigrants coming to America were ignorant minions in the thrall of the pope.

Anti-Catholic pop culture

In the 1830s, anti-Catholicism deepened its presence. Advances in printing technology and the expansion of the reading public meant that, for the first time, anti-Catholic books could be produced for mass consumption. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist pastor whose daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” both wrote vociferous — and immensely popular — anti-Catholic books.

But the most insidious anti-Catholic novel of the era appeared in 1836, when a group of Protestant preachers published “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.” Like “The Da Vinci Code,” it purported to be based in fact but was actually a complete fabrication. It also promised to “reveal” devastating “truths” that the church conspired to keep hidden.

But most important, just like “The Da Vinci Code,” “Maria Monk” was a publishing phenomenon. Selling more than 300,000 copies, it ranked third in book sales throughout the entire 19th century, behind only the Bible and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” If they owned one book, the average 19th century family owned a Bible. If they owned more than one book, they probably owned “Maria Monk.”

Written like a trashy Gothic novel, “Maria Monk” tells the story of a young nun who had escaped from a Montreal nunnery. The story is disturbing to the point of becoming surreal: Imprisoned in a warren of secret passageways and hidden rooms, innocent nuns serve as virtual sex slaves of priests. Nuns who resist are tortured and stomped to death, and the babies born from their illicit encounters are murdered and thrown into a pit in the basement.

Nothing in the book is true. Yet, millions of Americans, steeped in anti-Catholic stories for so long, were primed to believe it, and many still do. “Maria Monk” was reissued in hardcover in 1996, and the text now lives eternally on the Internet.

What it all means

“Maria Monk” and “The Da Vinci Code” show that anti-Catholic fiction has had a long history in American popular culture — and that it has always sold well.

Like the 1830s, the shelves of bookstores today are bulging with anti-Catholic books and thrillers, from “The Last Templar” to “The Third Secret.” The only difference is that this new crop of books is anti-Christian, too. Ironically, the publishing phenomenon created by Protestants to attack Catholics in the 19th century has turned to attack its makers as well.

Playing into deep suspicions and “revealing” things readers already want to believe, anti-Catholic novels like “The Da Vinci Code” snare audiences in a web of lies and half-truths. Seductive and strange, they insinuate themselves into the cultural imagination. In a way only a liar would love, their deceptions are crafted to seem truer with time.

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