“We can do no great things. Only small things with great love.” And this book is an enchanting, coherent account of what that means for the leisure hours of the average Christian. It may not make you blow up your TV. But it should leave you wanting to live a simple family life of small hospitality, music, sport and storytelling. It will show you how that life is only possible when prayer, primarily the Mass, is enthroned in the heart of the family. Best of all, it will convince you that the life is there for the taking. All you have to do is take it.

“I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.”

That collar wouldn’t have suited him as a doctor anyway.

     Now of course a lot of this is because of the lemming phenomenon of pop hysteria, but I offer another explanation as well, beginning with the fact that as fiction goes, The Da Vinci Code is actually pretty lame. The tangled-up puzzle of plot is pretty well put together, but the only trick Brown knows to induce suspense is to break every chapter at a critical juncture, the little surprises he tries are utterly predictable, and worst of all, he has the vocabulary of a smart grade 5 student.

     Here’s a related fact: a lot of crummy fiction gets published and read by Christians simply because it’s Christian. Such works are read not because they tell good stories, but because they make a point. The same thing works for an un-Christian message: why is the Code so popular in spite of being poorly written? Because, I fear, there are a lot of people who are less interested in the story than in the denial of Christ’s kingship. Don’t know how to conclude this post, so I’ll leave it at that.

Viva Christo Rey!

Yes, the clergy in Rome are blessed with potent faith, and because of this, their beliefs can weather any storm, including documents that contradict everything they hold dear. But what about the rest of the world? What about those who are not blessed with absolute certainty? What about those who look at the cruelty in the world and say, where is God today? … What happens to those people, Robert, if persuasive scientific evidence comes out that the Church’s version of the Christ story is inaccurate…

Just replace “persuasive scientific evidence” with “insistently worded fabrication” and I think we get the purpose of the book.

     When I first heard the basic plotline, I thought “So what? It’s a fictional work, and no rational human being would let a novel alter his beliefs.” The book was a damnable work of blasphemy, but couldn’t be an effective mass marketing tool of anti-Christ propaganda. Then I read it.

     Novel or not, the Code is written to sound as much as possible like fact. Brown begins the volume with a half page listing the seven or eight details of the book that he is confident are true, such as the actual existence of Opus Dei and their new headquarters in New York. I’m sure this list is supposed to make the reader take the rest of the story in a more factual light. In the most anti-Church portions of the book, the two most educated characters are constantly saying: “It’s a matter of historical record,” or “Sophie, the historical evidence supporting this is substantial.” Your first instinct is to trust the person speaking to you, so when Brown suggests that Constantine invented Christ’s divinity, your personal devil whispers worriedly in your ear: “Oh, what if that’s true?”

     To top the whole thing off, Brown implies all over the place, none too subtly, that if we’re willing to deny Christ’s divinity, we’ll all get to have lots of sex. And of course he subscribes to that most notorious lie that the Church is the enemy of sex. Having first tempted the mind, he now appeals to the body. Go ahead and try to come up with a better combination for apostasy.

*Conclusion to follow*

“Certainly sir. Would that be blasphemy or non?”