March 31, 2005
Smile
“There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true. The church is founded on a story that some people believe and some people don’t, so the Vatican tends to get very threatened by other versions of that story, especially racier ones.”
These words, more or less, could have been straight out of the 15th century about the time Johann Gutenberg’s bestseller known as “The Holy Bible” hit the news stands and people began to find a “racier” version than previously approved. But they aren’t. They were spoken only just this last week in a press release by the Vatican’s cardinal assigned to oversee and denounce any undesirable reading that might get into the hands of the people.
The current book in question? Dan Brown’s publishing miracle, “The Da Vinci Code.” It’s already translated into forty-four languages with a mere twenty-five million copies in circulation. [For more, cf Maureen Dowd, “The Vatican Code,” NY Times, 27 Mch 2005, p 11]