It evokes the Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown flap for a Vatican official to slam Dan Brown's fictional characters, but a former Vatican reporter explained it this way: "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."
Mr. Brown's zippy version has Jesus and Mary Magdalene marrying and having children. This "perverts the story of the Holy Grail, which most certainly does not refer to the descendants of Mary Magdalene," Cardinal Bertone said. "It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies."
The novelist is not the first one to conjure romantic sparks between the woman usually painted as what one writer calls "the Jessica Rabbit of the Gospels" and the eligible young Jewish carpenter and part-time miracle worker.
For years, female historians and novelists have been making the case that Mr. Brown makes, that Mary Magdalene was framed and defamed, that the men who run Christianity obliterated her role as an influential apostle and reduced her to a metaphor for sexual guilt.
The church refuses to allow women to be ordained as priests because there were no female apostles. So if Mary Magdalene was a madonna rather than a whore, the church loses its fig leaf of justification for male domination and exclusion.
The utter vacuousness of comparing this with the Murphy Brown flap should be enough to send any thinking person to the sports page. And excuse me for doubting that Dowd has any credentials whatsoever to speak as a theologian. I am forced to wonder what exactly is her "fig leaf justification" for even calling herself an intellectual?
And, for a kicker:
After whipping you into a feminist frenzy over the hidden agenda of the church's unjustly perpetuating itself as an all-male, all "celibate" institution - precepts that have clearly led to some unnatural perversions and attracted a disproportionate number of priests fleeing sexual confusion
So according to Dowd, it is the Catholic Church that makes priests assault young boys. It's too stupid and openly bigoted to be believed, and very much at home in the Times. Arguing with Dowd would be like arguing with David Duke. It is simply pointless.
Over at Captain's Quarters they haven't thought it entirely pointless. In their nice post they present this handy list of some of the troubling anti-Catholic aspects of The Da Vinci Code that have caused this whole thing, including:
The problem is that many of the ideas that the book promotes are anything but fact, and they go directly to the heart of the Catholic faith. For example, the book promotes these ideas:
* Jesus is not God; he was only a man.
* Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
* She is to be worshiped as a goddess.
* Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.
* That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.
* The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.
* Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.
* The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.
* In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.
* There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.
* The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.
* The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.
Catholics should be concerned about the book because it not only misrepresents their Church as a murderous institution but also implies that the Christian faith itself is utterly false.
Why exactly isn't the Catholic Church, or any other institution for that matter, entitled to defend itself from this kind of crap? Because such a defense would upset anti-Catholic bigots like Dowd? I'm sorry, but no one gets a free pass on their hatred. Not even Maureen Dowd of the New York Times.
On second thought maybe this is the Times and Dowd's way of telling all their Catholic readers "Happy %$#^ing Easter, You Dumb %$#holes."
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