Belittling The Catholic Church; Fiction Trumps Fact

It's more than a little ironic that a writer has discovered a successful formula for success in demonizing the Roman Catholic Church. Certainly the institution of the Catholic Church has much to answer for in historical abuses of human rights. From the bloody adventures of the Crusades, to the equally bloody tortures and deaths of the Inquisition, to the institutionalized depictions of Jews as Christ-killers and the associated encouragement of their isolation, victimization and wholesale slaughter.

And then, of course, there is the indelicate reminder in modern history of the Holy See not exercising itself unduly as a great moral voice in world affairs to take the trouble to firmly, loudly condemn Nazi Germany's extremely successful pursuit of refining a death machine so punctilious in its performance that it proved capable of annihilating millions of people in the fascist march toward establishing the Thousand-Year Reich. Pope Pious XII considered the better part of valour to equate with no overt reaction.

We are now in a different era altogether. This is the 21st Century, the world is enlightened, the international community forges a bond which the advanced countries of the world urge upon all to respect human rights and eschew discrimination, racism, anti-Semitism. The current Pope, Benedict, has been asked to condemn another genocidal state, and we are awaiting his words of blazing censure. He has not hesitated to condemn anti-Semitism, any manner of racism, nor to declare the Holocaust a seminal event in humankind's inhumanity.

That apart, those two best-selling novels of the duplicity and criminality of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy feeds on a public fascination with intrigue, murder and para-normal events tied into the sacrosanct institution of the Holy See and its infallible Shepherd of God, surrounded by unscrupulously entitled Cardinals whose first order of business is the venally-inspired enrichment of the Church and its protection from any suspicion of vicious skulduggery.

The ruthless authority author Dan Brown's novels portray, the irreligious murder plots, the creative evil of his Satanic portrayals of the Church's secretive and powerful institutions thrill a huge audience, prepared to believe any half-baked plot calling into question the orthodoxies of God's written word in a totally different interpretation, hauling readers into a conspiratorial aura of the cognoscenti.

The pity of it is that the novels are clumsily written with few exceptions, in the execution of the plot, the descriptions of arcane rites and forbidden scenes of human lust, avarice and malediction. Simply put, these novels, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, represent junk fiction, poorly conceived, just as awkwardly realized and committed to the printed page.
Best left ignored by any self-respecting book-lover who appreciates creative literary talent.

The books are really self-disparaging through their clumsy construction, questionable plots, poor grasp of the writer's art. And defused in their vendetta-scoring malice by a sensible Church response, dismissing them as 'harmless'.