Who’s afraid of Da Vinci?

It appears a self-styled "anti-pornography" group is calling for the banning of the film version of Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. This same group is calling on the aptly-named chair of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, Madame Consoliza La Guardia to guard the morality of this nation by giving the movie an "X" (or Not for Public Viewing") rating.

What arrant nonsense! In order to guard the MTRCB’s reputation for fairness and sobriety, Chair La Guardia also says the Board will make its decision once it has viewed the film and solemnly determined whether or not it "grossly" violates the law.

The morally offended and thoroughly shocked complainants argue that the film offends a religion (the Catholic Church and, I take it, the Opus Dei), defames a dead person (Jesus Christ) and violates Filipino contemporary values, customs, and laws. They admit though that they have not seen the film. Neither have I, although I have seen trailers on television, as well as advance interviews of Director Ron Howard and leading man Tom Hanks who plays Harvard professor Robert Langdon.

But, I take it, our anti-pornography diehards have read Brown’s opus. And it’s by virtue of that reading, I suppose, that they have concluded that the book is so morally offensive, so blatantly anti-Catholic Church, and so gratuitously demonizes Opus Dei, that any filmic treatment of the book must necessarily reflect its utter depravity.

As such, the Filipino nation should be protected from its baser nature and not be allowed to pollute its collective eyes and ears with such unmitigated trash. Otherwise, we would all desert the Catholic Church in droves, withdraw belief from Jesus Christ as Divine Redeemer, and organize lynch mobs against those weirdos in Opus Dei.

Well, if the MTRCB wants to withhold decision until it’s seen the film, that I suppose can be defended on the ground that that is what the law mandates. However, I can think of no more useless venture that the Board will have to undertake than to "determine" (kuno) whether the film version of the Code has to be banned in this country. It is not irrelevant to point out that the book itself hasn’t been removed from the shelves of our favorite bookshops. Nor has anyone, much less author Brown, been hailed to court for writing "obscene" literature. To be sure, he’s been sued for allegedly plagiarizing certain key themes of his work, such as his take on the Holy Grail and those Gnostic Gospels which put in question certain deeply-held beliefs of Christians.

But he’s won that case. And now, a new lease on life is predicted for the controversial book published in 2003. So far, 40 million copies, in 44 languages, have been sold. Since the paperback edition was issued last March, 6 million copies have flown off the bookstores’ shelves. Several million more will likely be gobbled up as the film rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars from the world’s movie theatres.

Thankfully, the Catholic Church has largely ignored the brouhaha caused by the book, preferring to rely on the author’s assurances that the book is, after all, fiction. Not that the Church is at all pleased with some of the book’s "revelations," including the notions that: Jesus and Mary Magdalene, both of whom were born of Jewish royal families, married and had children; that, after the Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene sought refuge in France; that from that union a French royal line sprang which exists to this day.

Interesting but, as Brown admits, it’s still fiction, even if the plot is based on "hidden messages" in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and on certain "Gospels," such as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene which was among the Gnostic Gospels officially ignored by the Catholic Church through the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The Council included only four Evangelists – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – in the New Testament.

It appears many were misled by an opening section in the book with the heading, "Fact." There Brown said that the Priory of Sion, a secret society founded in Europe in 1099, and named in the book as the centuries-old guardian of the "explosive" secrets noted above, is real. So is a document called Les Dossiers Secrets, discovered at Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale, which identifies several members of the Priory, including Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci.

Opus Dei which, along with the Vatican and earlier Popes, comes in for considerable bashing, is a real organization. Some Opus practices, including "corporal mortification," are not denied by present members. Brown also makes clear that, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals" in his novel "are accurate." But that’s as far as it goes. He still says his work is fiction, exhaustively researched, but still a product of his admittedly fertile imagination.

In reaction to Brown’s novel, especially his "explosive" revelations about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, there has been a bumper crop of books "cracking" the da Vinci "Code" and debunking his plot line. These writings seek to disabuse the minds of those who might assume that Brown’s cleverly contrived presentation represents reality.

I’m not surprised that some are led to suspect that the Catholic Church may indeed, centuries ago, have tailored matters of doctrine to suit the political exigencies which Church leaders had to confront in order to survive in an uncertain world.

In the last analysis, as Brown himself acknowledges in the book, it is a matter of faith. It’s called faith precisely because man doesn’t have all the answers. Doubts not only exist, they flourish. "Revisionism" abounds, the latest of which is this Gospel of Judas which purports to put the New Testament’s epitome of Evil Incarnate in new and more favorable light.

If one’s faith is so fragile, if it enters a period of turmoil and crisis, simply because of a book, or a film, called The Da Vinci Code, then it might not have been faith at all, but blind conformity to what the "mob" is doing, sort of like following the crowd to Boracay during Holy Week.

I’m really surprised such a non-issue as the movie causes the MTRCB to have fits. Why, as reported by Time Magazine this week, even Opus Dei, the book’s villainous antagonist, hasn’t asked that the arguably libelous film be banned. All they’ve asked is that a disclaimer be included by the film’s producers that it may not represent the whole truth about the movement spawned by Saint Jose Maria Escriva. And, as far as I know, Director Howard and the producers have refused that request.