Papal Preacher Takes on Da Vinci Code

April 17, 2006

By John Thavis

The papal preacher, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, is not one to hold his tongue. In a Good Friday sermon in front of Pope Benedict and other Vatican officials in St. Peter’s Basilica, he took aim at The Da Vinci Code and what he described as an offshoot industry in apocryphal gospels.

Father Cantalamessa said the upcoming release of “a certain film” -- he avoided pronouncing the words The Da Vinci Code, though the reference was clear -- would give new impetus to a speculative wave that is confusing many Christians and generating big profits for others.

“Christ is still being sold, no longer to the heads of the Sanhedrin for thirty pieces of silver, but to publishers and booksellers for millions of dollars,” the preacher said.

Millions of people are being seduced by “clever rewriting of ancient legends,” he said. After the success of The Da Vinci Code, supposed “gospels” of Judas and Thomas were enjoying widespread attention, he said.

The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown’s novel and starring Tom Hanks, premieres May 17 at the Cannes Film Festival, and is expected to be seen by many more people than read the book. With that in mind, Father Cantalamessa said he felt a “duty to call attention to the huge misunderstanding which is at the bottom of all this pseudo-literature.”

“The apocryphal gospels on which they lean are texts that have always been known, in whole or in part, but with which not even the most critical and hostile historians of Christianity ever thought, before today, that history could be made,” he said.

Most of these unapproved gospels were written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, long after Jesus lived and died.

“It would be as if within two centuries an attempt were made to reconstruct present-day history based on novels written in our age,” he said.

The writings were produced by Gnostic sects, whose members believed that the material world is an illusion, and that Christ never assumed a human form because it was unworthy of the deity, Father Cantalamessa said.

He pointed out that some of these apocryphal texts say that marriage oriented to births should be avoided, and hold that women will be saved only if the feminine principle is transformed into the masculine principle.

“The funny thing is that today there are those who believe they see in these writings the exaltation of the feminine principle, of sexuality, of the full and uninhibited enjoyment of this material world, contrary to the official church which would always have frustrated all this!” he said.

To explain the popularity of these new works, Father Cantalamessa quoted the late biblical scholar Father Raymond Brown, who once commented that the more fantastic the scenario about Jesus, the more faddish interest it seems to generate -- especially if it involves Christ running off with Mary Magdalene.

When it comes to the Passion of Jesus, Father Brown wrote, “fiction is stranger than fact -- and often, intentional or not, more profitable.”

Father Cantalamessa also quoted St. Paul, who foresaw a time when people would be “itching for anything new” and would “shut their ears to the truth and turn to myths.”

The papal preacher said the new books and film didn’t really deserve to be discussed at the Vatican’s Good Friday liturgy. But he said church leaders should not allow “millions of people to be crassly manipulated by the media, without raising a cry of protest.”