For a while now I have been observing the different reactions the movie “The da Vinci Code” has elicited from different groups of committed Catholics. In the following article, I would like to enumerate these reactions, point out their shortcomings and then suggest what I feel should be our reaction to this latest attack on our beliefs. One reaction has been to ignore the movie, to not patronize it. The Bishop has asked the people not to patronize the movie. I think it is elementary psychology that if you forbid something, that something becomes the focus of attention and attraction for the people. I believe that most people in Goa would not have been aware of the movie if the Bishop had not spoken about it. And I think the result of his “advice” would be a large black market for the CD’s of the movie. If I was working for increasing the sales of the movie, I couldn’t have done better myself! Another reaction has been to compromise with the movie. The honorable priests who watched the movie with the members of the Censor Board only demanded that a disclaimer be inserted at the beginning and at the end of the movie stating that the contents of the movie are a work of fiction. But how can someone produce a fiction about historical personalities? What would be the reaction of the Jews if someone wrote a fiction stating that Adolph Hitler was fit to be canonized a saint by the Church because of his kindness to Jews? Or suppose I were to write a story about these priests implying that they were involved in all manner of sinful activities; and then try to pass it off as a fiction. Would these gentlemen maintain their peace? I think the only recourse open to them would be to sue me for defamation in order to safeguard their names and reputations. Then how is it that after being aware of all the lies being stated about their Lord and Master (in whose name they claim all their social and spiritual privileges), they are satisfied with just this palliative? What would leave a deeper impression on the people? Fifteen seconds of the statement “this is a fictional work”; or two hours of the movie spewing lie after vile lie about the character of Jesus, true Man and true God? (What happens to those viewers who come late for the movie or leave without seeing the disclaimer at the end?) So I feel that the learned priests could have suggested that the name and likeness of Jesus be changed in both the movie and the book; and, failing that, call upon the Church to sue the author of the book and the maker of the movie. Sue them for not only hurting the religious sentiments of the billions of Christians worldwide, but also for defaming the Name of Jesus, who Himself says, “Great is my name among the nations” (Mal. 1:11). Yet another reaction has been the demand to ban the movie. Many claim it is the work of the devil (it is). But those who correctly recognize the real author and maker of the book and the movie do not seem to understand how he works. He works through lies, constantly repeated till the hype becomes over powering; and people start thinking that the whole thing might indeed be true. He verily makes a mountain of what is not even a molehill. And if you ban his work, then you push him into the darkness, which is his

sphere. In the darkness he will only grow more powerful and uncontrollable; he will gain more disciples to his fraud. For in the darkness, even a molehill looks like a mountain. In my opinion, the reason why the movie has had such an impact is because the Catholics have not been made aware of the role of the devil in Church History. I hold the Catholic clergy to blame for this state of affairs. “The da Vinci Code” is a golden opportunity for the clergy to make up for this lapse. Failure to do this will give the devil a chance to produce many more Dan Browns in future to shake our faith and, if possible, “to deceive even the elect” (Mt 24:24). In the lines that follow, I will outline my ideas about how the Catholic clergy may make up for its lapse. At the outset, I wish to formally state that the being behind “The da Vinci Code” is the devil. The book seeks to defame the Name of Jesus the Christ. In an age where impurity and lustfulness is not only endemic, but is presented as desirable, the book seeks to make impure the memory of the only Man who remained pure, despite being tested in every way by the devil and his agents. For, if we accept that Jesus himself gave in to impurity, then we, the rest of humanity, sorely tried by impurity on ever side, have no reason to resist impurity. If the Master himself failed, (as the book would have us believe), then how can we win? The only recourse open to us is to give in to our impure lusts and join in the devil’s party. And that is what the devil wants. So who is the devil? And why does he seek to malign Jesus? What means does he use to malign him? Catholic tradition teaches us that of all the angels created by God, Lucifer (whose name means, “the Light Bearer”), was the most beautiful and powerful. At a certain stage of their existence, in order to test them, God revealed to them the future creation of man. This creature and his progeny would need someone to show them the light so they could reach God. It was implicitly understood that these creatures would pay great reverence and adoration to the one who would show them the light. When Lucifer proudly presumed to arrogate to himself both the role and the resultant reverence, God dropped his bombshell. He had reserved that role not for Lucifer, light bearer though he was, but for his Son who would incarnate as man. Lucifer understood that the great reverence from man would go not to him, but to Jesus. In that instant Lucifer decided that “he would not serve God”. In that instant, he became the devil. In that instant, was born the enmity between the devil and Jesus. In that instant, the devil, in his jealousy, decided that he would for ever more, work to ensure that the Name of Jesus would become, among men, a name to be reviled and despised and dishonored and, if possible, forgotten entirely. For the last two thousand years, the devil has been trying to do precisely that by using men as his agents. Let us see how. During the lifetime of Jesus, the devil used many men who tried by every possible means to smear his name and his reputation. They were mainly to be found among the leaders of

Jewish society; the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the scribes. They called him “a friend of prostitutes and sinners”, “a drunkard and a glutton”, etc (Mt. 11:19). When the Jewish leaders demanded that Jesus be killed, they demanded that he be put to death by crucifixion right from the beginning. They were not satisfied by merely having him put to death, but they wanted him put to death only by crucifixion. Why were they so intent on his crucifixion? The devil, whose agents these leaders were, wanted to make Jesus a man not fit even to be spat upon by the Jews and non-Jews (gentiles) for all time. For among the Jews there was a sacred law; “cursed by God is he who hangs from a tree”. So the devil, through his agents, demanded that Jesus be hung from a tree, i.e. crucified. And among the gentiles, crucifixion was understood as reserved for those criminals whose crimes were unspeakably horrendous. It was reserved for the worst of slaves. So, with one stroke, the devil wanted the Name of Jesus to become contemptible to all people. Hence the demand to have Jesus crucified. Those of us today, who have become conditioned to bowing down before the dead Man-God hanging on the cross, have no idea how difficult it was for the earliest preachers of Christianity to convince non-believers that Jesus was God. In fact Paul testifies that Christ crucified was a scandal to his Jewish hearers and foolishness to the gentiles (who were used to worshipping so called gods who were pictured as handsome, well fed and many-armed , each arm wielding fearful weapons). And so, we may say that the greatest triumph of the devil, in his attempt to bring disrepute to the Name of Jesus, was his success in getting Him crucified. But the “triumph” became useless when Jesus rose from the dead and rapidly gained adherents to His teaching. For these, the Man-God on the cross became a figure to be held in awe and reverence rather than contempt. So the devil received his first slap, so to say, in his attempt to defame the Name of Jesus. But he did not give up. After the Ascension of Jesus, the devil unleashed raw terror upon the fledgling Christian community. For more than 300 years, being a Christian was illegal. There was no guarantee of life or liberty or property for a Christian. Christians were associated with the scum of society and were killed publicly in well-planned pogroms called persecutions which were organized by the devil’s agents in Rome which included the Emperors. By attacking Christianity in its cradle, the devil tried to stamp out the Name of Jesus from the earth. But he again received a slap when the Roman Emperor Constantine himself became a Christian in around 300 AD and proclaimed Christianity as state religion! But the devil is nothing if not persistent (in his folly!). Having failed to legally stamp out the Name of Jesus, he then thought of another strategy. He planted his agents within the Christian society. (ref.: the parable of the weeds). He then used them to confuse the Christians and to cause schisms among them. We call these agents “the heretics”. We may define a heretic as a person, who outwardly looked like a Christian (in his name, dress, and ritual worship), but who inwardly was keen on creating a rift in Christian

society by presenting an idea that was a deviation from the revealed Word of God, i.e. the Bible, or from the Catholic Tradition. One of the very first heretics was a group called the Docetists, who claimed that Jesus escaped from hi body before his Crucifixion. So Jesus did not suffer and so there is no question of his suffering being redemptive. This would imply that Jesus is one more preacher, who when his preaching was put to the supreme test, preferred to escape! Next was Marcion, a bishop, who taught that Jesus had triumphed over the harsh and cruel god of the Old Testament. So, as Christians, we were bound to accept only the New Testament. But soon, it became clear that all signs indicating that Jesus is the promised savior are present in the Old Testament. So, if we reject it, we reject the proof that Jesus is the Messiah. And so, if we reject the Old Testament today, future generations would automatically reject Jesus as Messiah, because, where is the proof? Perhaps the greatest attack on the Bible was launched by Arius, another Bishop. He preached that “Jesus was the most perfect creation of the Father”. But Jesus is the Creator God, not a creature, proclaimed the Christian church. When the protagonists of these ideas finally clashed, Arius had to admit that if Jesus was a creature, then he may have erred in his teachings or behavior (since all creatures, be they angels or man, had erred). And so if Jesus had erred, then since his errors can’t be pinpointed, then the whole New Testament may be riddled with errors, effectively finishing off the Good News! But all these weeds among the wheat were eventually found out, exposed as weeds and weeded out by the Church. But once again the devil, thought of an idea. It’s an idea he is still using today. He inspired his minions to write pseudo gospels. Certain men in the church claimed to posses “gnosis”, a special revealed knowledge which helped the soul to transcend the bounds of the body and reach God. According to these worshippers of knowledge, called “Gnostics”, the cosmos is governed by the great unknowable God. From time to time he sends a spirit down into this world – which (world) is under the control of the evil creator god. That spirit enters a suitable body, gives forth its knowledge to the hearers, and, when its mission is accomplished, abandons the body of the host and reenters the real (great unknowable) God. The Christ was one such spirit, who possessed the body of the man Jesus, gave forth his gnosis, and then abandoned the body, leaving the hapless man Jesus to be crucified. So, for the Gnostics, the body was an evil prison, created by the evil creator which kept the soul imprisoned and prevented it from becoming one with the unknowable god. So the aim of life was to get rid of this bodily prison as soon as possible. Two trends emerged: One trend of thought preached that all things that give pleasure to the body, fortify the body and give rise to more bodies (sex, procreation, food, medicine) was evil.

The second trend was that since the body was of no consequence, what was done with it was of no consequence either. The “Masses” of these people degenerated into senseless, hedonistic and sexual orgies. Gnostics took to writing ‘gospels” through which they shared their poisonous ‘knowledge”. The result was ‘the gospel of Judas, the gospel of Thomas, etc”. It is from such books that the material of the da Vinci Code emerges. The confusion about the teaching in these books became so great that finally St. Irenaeus took upon himself the task of selecting the books which would form the Bible and those to be rejected, as not being inspired by God. It is immediately obvious that if the laity today had even a passing idea of church history, they would have at once recognized the Gospel of Judas and the material of the da Vinci Code as Gnostic in origin. And the interest in both would be still-born. This is, I believe, a crucial lacuna in the Church’s preparation; in that it has failed to teach its adherents the roots of the Christian religion. This will give the Devil the chance to create and set loose many more Dan Browns among us. So this is how I believe the fight against the Code should be carried on. It has to be part of the ongoing Christian struggle against the devil:

Don’t ignore him, for then he remains free to create more confusion among us. Don’t allow him leeway, for then he will demand still greater compromises. Don’t ban him, for in the darkness, he grows stronger. But rather, bring him to the place where the light of Truth and faith can be shined upon him. In this light, he is seen to be what he really is: a liar and a deceiver who uses his vast intelligence and power to fabricate and spread lies about Jesus the Christ.