A thriller, nothing else Amy Fernandes   Across India Christian groups are up in arms. The Catholic Social Forum has collected over 50,000 signatures, the clergy has voiced its protest, and the Bombay Catholic Sabha wants government to intervene. On what? A film. The Da Vinci Code. I am a practising Catholic. I have read the book. I was hooked from the first page. Why? Not because of the titillating details of Christ’s life. Not for the 'revelations' about the Catholic Church or the Opus Dei. I read it for the page-turning raciness of a thriller. The author makes some preposterous assumptions: That Jesus married and fathered a child; that Jesus's bloodline lives on; that the Opus Dei is some kind of a Vatican mafia; that the 'villainous' Church suppressed the Feminine Divine. But the book also contains some very well crafted research on art and social history, which makes compelling reading. But only as a thriller. Which explains why it sold 40 million copies worldwide, including India and was translated into 44 languages. But wait a minute. How come there was no protest about the book? It was freely sold at traffic junctions, there were pirated versions and illustrated editions and soft and hard back and we were spoilt for choice. I do not recall anyone asking for a ban on the book. Which is as it should be. I would be forgiven for presuming that several thousand Christians in India also read the book. Did the success of the book, worldwide, shake the Catholic Church? Have our beliefs changed? None of us, the faithful, who read the book believed for a moment that any of it was true. Christianity has survived and grown for centuries. A mere film is not going to topple it. By protesting so much, are we not giving the film more importance than it deserves? Dan Brown's fiction deserves to be treated as just that: Fiction. Brown even sensationalises fiction. Many of his assumptions are laughable. Anyone who believes that the figure next to Christ in the depiction of the Last Supper is a woman, needs an education.   Which is why the call for a ban seems to me like expending so much energy on what the rest of the world has accepted as a piece of fiction. The film has already been passed in 34 countries, including Asia as well as Italy , home of the Vatican . The world has moved on since it burnt heretics at the stake. Father Myron Pereira, director, Xavier's Institute of Communication , is right when he says, "The movie could have been a stepping stone to understand the faith better". A man of the cloth seems to have understood the film better than the protesting laity. What purpose have bans ever served? In case this ban goes through, it is going to feed the pirating industry. Once a book or a film goes underground, it sells at a premium. It propels hitherto unknown people to fame. Look what it did to the Danish cartoonists. The Satanic Verses became the most coveted book once a ban was imposed by Islamic fundamentalists. History buffs and the literati sat up and took notice of James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, when it became the subject of controversy. Are we as a Catholic community not turning intolerant, aiding and abetting the new all-pervasive fundamentalism? Surely as an enlightened and democratic community we can match fiction with faith? In fact, the verdict is out already. The film has been canned in Cannes . The faithful may call this divine intervention. When a film promises to die a death by boredom, it will have its own closure. But all is not lost. This exercise proves that Christians can be a cohesive and coherent body, capable of influencing changes. If only we had protested with the same zeal not too long ago when nuns were being raped, churches were being attacked and priests humiliated and Graham Staines and his young sons burnt alive, Nicholas Almeida might have been the hero we needed. RESPONSE [posted on 19th May 2006, 23.35 hrs]   ‘Da Vinci Code’ has obviously rattled both the Church and doctrinaire laity, as is apparent from Amy’s feeble attempts (TOI – ‘A Thriller, Nothing Else’ - May 19, 2006) at treating it as nothing more than “a thriller” and indulging thereby in futile self-hypnosis by asking, “Have our beliefs changed?”     “There was no protest about the book” precisely because its author does not question any fundamental Christian belief like Christ’s doubtful historicity, immaculate conception, virgin birth, ministry as the prophesied Jewish ‘messiah’, crucifixion or resurrection. Like Martin Luther a few centuries ago, he merely exposes all the skullduggery that has so far passed for ‘organized religion’ [‘In God’s Name’ by David Yallop and ‘The Dark Side of Christian History’ by Helen Ellerby are other must-reads]. While Martin Luther challenged the doctrine of papal infallibility and the selling of indulgences leading to the Reformation, Brown apparently wants the world to know why and how various ‘Gnostic’ doctrines, which accorded a rightful status of parity to the female element at the same time heavily debunking the doctrine of apostolic succession, were ruthlessly suppressed for two thousand years – a process we sadly permit to continue even in the ‘age of reason’!   Perhaps, neither she nor the groups who are protesting against the film are fully, if at all aware of the dire straits in which their ‘mother church’ finds itself in the countries of its birth - a reason for no protests and no calls for a ban there. The lay Christian is only nominally so, and could hardly be bothered about the consequences for the Church of a film made on a best-seller that exposes its dark deeds so lucidly.     But religio-politico-commercial stakes for a Church beleaguered by pronounced lackadaisical interest in Christianity, dwindling church attendances and ever-increasing moral disrepute, are much too high to be as fleetingly dismissed as Amy would wish. Isn’t the fact that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone was officially appointed by the Vatican to debunk Brown’s claims [see http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1438297,00.html ] sufficient evidence that the Church takes the issue far more seriously than laity like Amy? And, given the obvious ignorance of Christians in India about mainly ‘non-spiritual’ activities of their Church [see Yallop, supra], how do we know for certain that these ‘protests’ haven’t actually been engineered by the clergy?   At the end of the day, one wonders whether it is faith in Christ or faith in the buying power of the ‘poor’ Church that has an upper hand in India !