It’s just fiction. Nobody takes it seriously.
At least, that’s what I’ve been told by people who snicker at why us Catholic folk sometimes tend to get up in arms over crap like Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci Code. To them, there shouldn’t be an issue there, and they can’t quite grasp how there could be an issue there. Fiction is fiction, right?
Well, yes, fiction is fiction…but that’s not the problem. The problem is that Dan Brown does a very clever job of dressing up his fiction as fact, or at least as being based on well-researched truths. And too many people (even one is too many, and the number is way more than just one) buy in to that and assume that contained within the text of Brown’s novels are glimpses of the hidden true history of the Catholic Church, its officies, and its lay ministries.
Which is why stories like this are so grating and, frankly, infuriating:
Residents of a quiet West Coast community say they will fight plans by a Catholic organization featured in the novel The Da Vinci Code to build a spiritual retreat in their town.
Opus Dei was depicted in the fictional bestseller by Dan Brown as a powerful and insidious secret society involved in a bloody conspiracy that reached up into the highest levels of the Church. The real-life organization, however, says there is nothing sinister about its plans.
Spokesman Fadi Sarraf said the group wants to build the 60,000 square foot facility on a 13-acre lot overlooking Britannia Beach, a former mining community located roughly 50 kilometres north of Vancouver on the route to Whistler.
Opus Dei was founded in 1928 in Spain by the Roman Catholic priest St. Josemaria Escriva, and is based on the belief that ordinary people can live ordinary lives that lead to sanctity.
The project will have benefits for the community, but those opposed to the plan have been handing out copies of The Da Vinci Code to encourage opposition, Sarraf said.
I’ve personally been accosted several times by people trying to pass off the book’s ludicrous claims as factual history and evidence against Catholicism. People actually do believe Brown’s prattle, as evidenced here again by the use of the book as a means of stirring up opposition to the proposed retreat. After all, who wants an organization that is really just a front for an international ring of albino priest assassins setting up shop in their picturesque coastal community?
Yeah, I know, the community’s principal objection is zoning. The book is still being used to inspire an emotional opposition to an otherwise entirely reasonable construction proposal.
Kudos to the CBC for (somehow) managing to paint an essentially correct picture of what Opus Dei actually is, though. That’s something.
(hat tip)
It might be a bad choice for zoning, but the fact that they were handing out copies of Mr. Brown’s book is somewhat absurd.
Imagine if someone wrote a novel about some jewish organization that was in an age-old plot for world domination? Could we say, it’s just fiction, it’s not like it’s going to hurt anyone?
God Bless,
Heh…that book has already been written. I believe it’s called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As propaganda goes, it’s a masterwork. Objectively, though, it’s a piece of anti-Semitic rubbish. Very popular in Arab nations, I understand.
Suspiciously, though, nobody (or almost nobody, at any rate) is willing to dismiss The Protocols as harmless mere fiction.