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The Vatican has appointed a top cardinal to rebut what it says are the lies, distortions and errors in Dan Brown's bestselling
thriller The Da Vinci Code.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa and a possible successor to the Pope, immediately took up the fight
yesterday by claiming that the novel was a deliberate attempt to discredit the Roman Catholic Church through absurd and vulgar
falsifications.
At the heart of the book is the notion that the Church has for centuries concealed the fact that Jesus married Mary Magdalene,
a former prostitute, and that she bore him a child.
The appointment of Cardinal Bertone, 70, is a clear sign that the Vatican has been rattled by the continuing worldwide
success of Brown's thriller, which has sold 18 million copies in 44 languages in just two years. It is still among the top
ten bestsellers in the United States, France, Brazil and Argentina, all countries with huge Catholic populations, and Britain.
The cardinal said that the book reminded him of intemperate anti-clerical pamphlets of the 19th century.
The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains
are true.
A perceived blurring of fact and fiction has caused the Vatican to act. Andrea Tornielli, a papal biographer, said it
was particularly alarmed at the sight of tourists in Rome using The Da Vinci Code as a guide to Christianity.
His latest task is to unmask the lies so that readers can see how "shameful and unfounded" the book is. One
of his first steps will be to "debunk the suggestion that the Church has become male dominated" and has buried its
feminine side, Cardinal Bertone told Il Giornale newspaper. In fact the female element is ever present in the Gospels, not
least in the person of the Virgin Mary.
He insisted that the trial, death and resurrection of Christ were indisputable. Evidence, he said, came from the accounts
of disciples who, as former fishermen, were hard-headed realists. He accused Brown of relying on apocryphal texts that had
been excluded from the biblical canon precisely because they were imaginative.
"He even perverts the story of the Holy Grail, which most certainly does not refer to the descendants of Mary Magadalene"
Cardinal Bertone said."It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies."
The cardinal also insisted that Brown was wrong to suggest that the organisation Opus Dei was a sinister and conspiratorial
body prepared to resort to murder.
The book has earned Brown an estimated £140 million and a film based on it starring Tom Hanks will be released later this
year.
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