The Da Vinci Hoax
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
25 Jul 2004
The novel begins with a murder, and continues at a cracking pace, every chapter ending with an unanswered question, but splutters out to a lame conclusion. It is full of implausible fantasy.
The central characters are an earnest Harvard professor, who plays fast and loose with history, a young French woman, brought up by her grandfather (the first victim), a rich and eccentric English aristocrat searching for the secret of the Grail and a fanatical Catholic “monk”, an albino and ex-criminal, who alternates between prayer, penance and multiple murders.
There is almost no sex, although this is balanced by many murders and repeated attacks on the Catholics of the past. Catholics today are no longer made of the same stern criminal stuff (except for the albino fanatic), and emerge as credulous dupes, led by a fat little Italian bishop running around Europe with a suitcase full of Vatican bank notes, who comes to grief under a new progressive pope about to unchurch “Opus Dei”, a devout Catholic sect devoted to brainwashing, coercion and corporal mortification.
This is only the start of the fun because the secret of the Grail is that Mary Magdalene married Christ, and gave birth to children whose descendants survive today. This secret has been protected by the Priory of Sion.
Mary Magdalene, not Peter, was the first head of the Christian Church, so that the Grail is symbolic of the lost goddess, the sacred feminine, whose secret, if revealed, would destroy the Catholic Church. This was why the Church banished the goddess, burned non-believers, subjugated women and forbade pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.
If this is not nonsense enough the book claims the divinity of Christ was not asserted until the third century (despite the gospels and Paul’s letters) and the Catholic Church later killed five million witches. In fact “every faith in the world is based on fabrication”.
Last week a Year 12 student asked me whether the faith of Catholics had been damaged by these lies. I replied that I didn’t think so, although feminists and ex-Christians could be more interested. Those who know nothing about Christianity or history might also be tempted to think it half true, and that would be damage enough.
Others who have been taught that truth cannot be found in history will be tempted to applaud the cleverness, and not worry about distortions and inaccuracies. For those who want to know what actually lies behind these tall tales “The Da Vinci Hoax. Exposing the errors in The Da Vinci Code” by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel is an effective and honest debunking. And their book is well named.
