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Title: Top Cardinal Blasts 'Da Vinci Code' as 'Cheap Lies'
Source:
Netscape News
URL Source: http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news ... 2&dt=20050315130200&w=RTR&covi
Published: Mar 15, 2005
Author: Reuters
Post Date: 2005-03-15 17:59:13 by Mr Nuke Buzzcut
Keywords: Cardinal, Blasts, Cheap
Views: 7295
Comments: 568
Top Cardinal Blasts 'Da Vinci Code' as 'Cheap Lies' ROME (Reuters) - A top Catholic cardinal has blasted "The Da Vinci Code" as a "gross and absurd" distortion of history and said Catholic bookstores should take the bestseller off their shelves because it is full of "cheap lies." Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in an interview with the Milan newspaper Il Giornale, became the highest ranking Italian Churchman to speak out against the book, an international blockbuster that has sold millions of copies. "(It) aims to discredit the Church and its history through gross and absurd manipulations," Bertone, the archbishop of the northern Italian city of Genoa and a close friend of Pope John Paul told the paper in its Monday edition. "This seems like a throwback to the old anti-clerical pamphlets of the 1800s," he said. The central claim of the book, written by American Dan Brown, is that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children. The Bible says Jesus never married, was crucified and rose from the dead. Bertone's comments were significant because until the Pope named him archbishop of Genoa in 2003 he was for years the number two man at the Vatican's most powerful department - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "You can find that book everywhere and the risk is that many people who read it believe that those fairy tales are real," he said. "I think I have the responsibility to clear things up to unmask the cheap lies contained in books like that." HOLY GRAIL A central storyline of the book is that the Holy Grail is not the cup which Christ is said to have used at the Last Supper but really the bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Bertone calls this idea "a perversion." Bertone is so incensed about the novel that he will be the key speaker at a roundtable in Genoa Wednesday night attempting to dismantle the book, which also accuses the Church of covering up the female role in Christianity. "I will try to clear things up and help form consciences," the cardinal said. "I think that when faced with affirmations that are so shameful and unfounded, readers who have even a minimum of basic (Christian) formation should react," he said. He said it was "sad" that even Catholic bookstores were selling The Da Vinci Code "for purely economic reasons." One bookstore selling "The Da Vinci Code" is the one in the Gemelli Hospital, a Catholic institution where the Pope spent a total of 28 days in two stints in February and March. In the interview, Bertone firmly rejected the book's claim that the feminine role in Christianity had been suppressed. "This is one of the most vulgar of inventions. The feminine element is present in all the Gospels," Bertone said. Bertone also strongly defended Opus Dei, the conservative Church organization that the book depicts as a ruthless, Machiavellian group that resorts even to murder in its attempt to keep the Church's secrets hidden. The novel is going to reach an even wider audience next year with the release of a film based on the book staring Tom Hanks. © Copyright Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Reuters Ltd. 03/15/2005 13:02 RTR
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#441. To: Mr Nuke Buzzcut, All (#0)
Here's a modest review of the thread topic ... Da Vinci Code Your Life Everything is interwoven. Jesus tongue kissed Mary Magdalene, a lot. Potent juicy mystical secrets are everywhere, if you know where to look. Organized religion is the worst possible answer. What supposedly sacred truths are available to us are all relative to those who hold the power. Often, just behind the facade of things is a huge hunk of gorgeous convoluted magic you would do well to lick. Meanwhile, the divine feminine is right there, winking, sighing heavily, waiting for you. Like, duh. And oh yes, there are so many repressed buried burned crushed or otherwise flayed secrets of the true nature of divinity floating in the air like a mad delicious perfume, mysteries that have been rather nauseatingly overpowered by the rank dank cologne of the patriarchal church -- it's all you can do to breathe deeply anymore without gagging on all the repressed sexuality and stale machismo. This much we know. Simple truths, all of them. And all so nicely mapped out in Dan Brown's deliciously well-researched (if rather flawed), still red-hot best-seller "The Da Vinci Code," that incendiary little page-turner packed like a hot sausage with combustible and wonderfully damning religious fact and insinuation and researched tidbit that all serve to make the church and its more uptight sects cringe and recoil and deny deny deny. So you know it must be true. Brown's is a book that, with the notable exception of a very bitter Mel Gibson and maybe the most denial-happy, millions of giddy readers have taken as radiant, irrefutable proof that we don't know nearly as much as we think we know, and a huge amount of what we've been force-fed by power-drunk religious orgs and political strategists lo these past centuries has been a gargantuan, sticky, carefully orchestrated deception. Not exactly shocking news, I know. Realizing those in power have swindled the world since time immemorial to preserve their hollow supremacy has become a bit of a cultural pastime. From well over 10,000 hideous sexual-abuse cases in the Catholic Church stretching back to 1950 to realizing how an American presidential regime has openly lied and betrayed the nation so as to lead our exhausted populace into two brutal unwanted wars and a paralyzing deficit just to further a corporate-crony agenda, you just sort of sit there and go, yeah, well, what else is new. But this is a bit different. The broad and rather intoxicating deceptions so refreshingly illuminated and carefully researched in Brown's book are of the kind that rattle worlds and question core beliefs and make your id sit up and go, hmm, maybe this means something slightly more, you know, potent. And wicked. And dangerous. In a good way. The book, of course, deals with hidden and long-buried truths surrounding the Holy Grail and all its concomitant intricate, astounding histories and secret societies and churchly deceptions, art and sex and pagan symbol, all very factual and well documented and all relating back to the "real" Jesus and his life, his true teachings and, of course, his wife -- and the church's ongoing, centuries-old oppression of the divine feminine. Hey, it's a page-turner. But it's also packed with enough intense and well-researched fact about art and religious "truth" and the church's repressed pagan history to make anyone but the most blindly devout begin to see things anew. But here's the divine gist: You don't have to stop with the book. The great thing about "The Da Vinci Code" is that it could very well do for the mass public what no other chunk of dense scholarly research, no subversive New Age movement, no horrific blood-drenched movie depicting the gruesome and sadomasochistic bludgeoning of a popular Jewish mystic could do: that is, offer the general public wide-open access to vital, unsettling questions of faith, of power, of Mystery with a capital M. It's true. Could the wild popularity of this little book mean we're more ready to hear more potent, revealing truths, to uncover the more divine meanings behind all those seemingly commonplace things we take for granted, to question those stagnant histories and false gods that have been so viciously forced upon us? Could it maybe indicate that we really are more ready than we've ever been to go beyond the church's meager misogynistic homophobic revisionist teachings, to start seeing the deeply mystical and hilariously twisted interconnectedness of the world? You think? I, for one, didn't want to read Brown's book. I am not much of a fan of quickie best-seller page-turners with minimal character development and nonexistent literary nuance and sledgehammer plot devices. But that's just the lit snob in me. I read it anyway. And I had a blast. And I realized, there is a lesson here. And it does not have to be about massive conspiracy theory. You do not have to agree with every conclusion in the book and start running around trying to uncover links to secret societies while sinister forces move about the Louvre. You do not even need to begin with the rather insidious and soul-delimiting dangers of organized religion. You can focus this kind of perspective, this awareness, on just about anything in your life. Food. Cars. Sex. Politics. Guns. You trust your instincts and pick at a thread of curiosity and you pull, read up and educate yourself, and pretty soon you're reading "Fast Food Nation" or "High and Mighty" or "Stupid White Men" and realizing not only how you've been duped but also how refreshing it is to see through the masks and the bogus marketing and the hidden histories. It does not have to be complicated. You simply begin to notice. You begin to see the signs, understand the symbols, the divine winks, realize that there are enormous hidden worlds of belief and interconnected history just under the manufactured and carefully orchestrated surface of things, mysteries that have long gone unnoticed or underappreciated or ignored but that are ready and eager for you to discover them anew. Old buildings have ghostly mystery. Cities are teeming with forgotten and often culturally blasphemous histories. Churches are packed with stolen pagan iconography. That enormous tree in the city park was there long before you were born and has stories of sex and revolution and lost dogs and time. See it? Simply put, taking Brown's book as a cue, you can begin to see the world with new eyes. And you can begin to understand that mystics were right: It is indeed a wildly animated, kaleidoscopic, convoluted, maddening, ever-morphing world -- one that is most certainly not all about allowing yourself to be trapped by the narrow mythology set forth in one, say, pseudo holy book's version of life, of flesh, of truth. After all, where is the mystery, the divine feminine thrust, the raw page-turning heat, in that?
Hallelujah, amen.
Ok, just start up the crap again. Go ahead. Make my day.
I'm repentant ... really I am ... I know the end is nigh ... or neigh.
#456. To: 2Trievers (#454)
Actually, I'm a breast man myself. I haven't been the same since my mother breast-fed me. She ruined my life.
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Can the blasphemous bestseller help you see the mystical world anew, or is it just another doorstop?
#444. To: 2Trievers (#441)
allowing yourself to be trapped by the narrow mythology set forth in one, say, pseudo holy book's version of life, of flesh, of truth.
#447. To: Samuel Gray, 2Trievers (#444)
#454. To: Don (#447)
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