What's Wrong with The Da Vinci Code? Continued
Nor is Opus Dei the unjustly-accused party, the novel's various misrepresentations notwithstanding. The killer albino monk, who commits his crimes precisely when he ceases to take orders from Opus Dei's "president-general" Aringarosa, is clearly not meant to be a typical member, and it becomes clear that this fictional Opus Dei is not a criminal organization but merely a pawn in the hands of the novel's real villain. In truth, most of Mr. Brown's errors regarding Opus Dei seem to reflect sensationalistic tastes and simple cluelessness rather than bad will.
No, the real victim of the novel's distortions is the Roman Catholic Church. The book's numerous factual errors about Christian history all work together for a single purpose: not to defame Jesus Christ or Opus Dei, but rather to make the Roman Catholic Church - in Brown's language, "the Vatican" - appear to be an evil, misogynistic, power-hungry blight on world history.
Much has been written about Brown's inaccurate descriptions of art, architecture, organizations, and documents, but, besides embarrassing his editors, these mistakes do relatively little harm. Nor is there great harm in the hypotheses and interpretations discussed by some of Brown's fictional characters, which are firmly in the realm of conjecture - fictional conjecture at that.
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