Deciphering the Code
Posted on April 25, 2006 - Filed Under Review |
IT'S really nothing but the tried and tested formula for thriller paperbacks — weave a tale of cults and conspiracies around your book on an otherwise drab socio-religious subject and presto, you've got a best-seller!
Dan Brown, author of the (in)famous The Da Vinci Code, must be laughing all the way to his bank, on the crest of the 40 million (and counting) copies of his book sold worldwide. Granting he had it in him to divine the normally undivinable of the Church's deep secrets, somewhere along the way, Brown must have simply succumbed to the lure of commercialism after having initially set out on a well-meaning crusade to "create trouble for truth."
Those who are fanning the popularityof the Da Vinci Code since it first hit the bookstores, Catholics among them, by both criticizing it or praising it, only add their own theories to further convolute a subject that, for all we know, was but a figment of a prolific author's imagination.
Sure, there were hard facts, correlated occurrences, even empirical Bible-supported "revelations" in Brown's book– but that's to be expected of an author worth his salt; to mix others' fact with his fiction as it were to produce a potent, marketable brew.
In this, the Opus Dei (Latin for 'Work of God') in the Philippines at least, has so far displayed a perfect understanding of the human psyche insofar as public reaction to the book — and negative image for their organization — is concerned. One writer in fact had termed the secret (?) Catholic society's reaction to the book "curiously calm" considering that the book maligned the worldwide reclusive organization founded in Spain in 1928 by St. Josemaria Escriva, painting it as bloodthirsty and murderously obsessed with preserving a Catholic deception.
Indeed, under other circumstances, would it be fair to expect Filipino Opus Dei members (almost 3,000 of them spread out in the country, an article said) to just take things lying down, or should they have mobilized their enormous influence to keep the contents and allegations of the book "sealed" from curious and heretic eyes?
Maybe they had simply given up trying to plug the growing leak in the dam. Or that, coming untrue to the impression created of them in the novel and the movie by author Brown, they realized discretion was the much better part of valor in this case? Nothing would be worse for them than to 'validate' Brown's points against their group by doing any overt or covert acts now to suppress the book.
What do I think of the book? As I said up front, It's just a book. It's not what is written in its pages; it's what you prefer to think about what you read in it.
And no, sir, ma'am, I am NOT a Catholic, much less Opus Dei. That's about as Da Vinci Cod-ish as I prefer to be about myself in this post.
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