FOR months now, friends, acquaintances and even strangers have asked me whether I have read the book and what I thought of it. I suppose they wanted to hear some explosive response from me.
But my standard answer has always been, no, I have not read the book, and I have no intention of wasting my time reading it, after knowing from all sorts of sources what the book is all about.
An anonymous person even gifted me with an expensive, de luxe, coffee table edition of the book. I thank him for the gesture, but I had a grand time burning it. That’s what I do with useless books. Yes, I go to that extent.
It might be finely written, making a good read for many people, and this makes it truly dangerous, since its content I imagine must be rotten from start to finish.
Imagine, a book trying to pose itself as fiction but conveying ideas that are asking to be treated as true. It requires a very crafty, wily writer to achieve such effect.
As I understand it, it questions basic doctrine of the Catholic faith, and weaves a complicated story of intrigue citing real institutions and thinly veiled real characters.
As an Opus Dei priest, I know that its references to that Church prelature are just a hogwash of lies and nastiness. I find it difficult to understand someone can find joy in doing such a thing at the expense of many people with hardly any trace of hard evidence to back up his claims. I pray for that person.
The book reminds me of the old apocryphal writings. Some of them were good, products of some exaggerated and often misplaced piety, but containing falsehoods that were subtly blended with pieces of truth.
But there were others that were simply bad, nasty, and malicious, taking advantage of certain commonly-held vague notions of things and cultural deficiencies of a people to inject their lies and venom.
It’s the same old tall tale woven by those crazy Gnostics of old who claimed they had some hidden knowledge of things but refused to be investigated nor their data verified, claiming that they are above these things.
In fact now, I understand a Church official have asked people not to read
the book, because of its dangerous character, and that a group is now seriously investigating the claims of the book, just to reveal the real score.
But what do we hear? Some people are accusing the Church of making another edition of the notorious crusade. They are again giving the image that they
are being pilloried and threatened of being burned at the stakes, yada, yada, yada.
Oh, well, such is life. That’s why I always advise others to just relax, keep you head intact, and not to be taken easily by fantastic stories.
That there are many people, millions of them, fascinated and intrigued by
this book, reminds me of what St. Paul once said in his second letter to Timothy:
“There will come a time when they will not endure the sound doctrine; but having itching ears, will heap up to themselves teachers according to their own lusts, and they will turn away their hearing from the truth and turn aside rather to fables.” (4,3-4)
That’s how I read the phenomenon. And so following the advice of St. Paul, I suppose the thing to do is just to continue and sustain the effort of evangelization, real-to-goodness and integral and thorough evangelization.
There are many souls in this world who may be well-educated and all that, but sad to say, they are ignoramuses when it comes to the faith. In fact, their basic understanding of faith is congenitally defective, since they take faith more as a result of their reasoning, and not as a divine gift.
Still, the advice of St. Paul just has to be followed. “Preach the word, be urgent in season, out of season. Reprove, entreat, rebuke with all patience and teaching…Be watchful in all things, bear with tribulation patiently, work as a preacher of the gospel, fulfill your ministry.” (2 Tim 4,2-5)
I hope many take this advice to heart, not only the priests, but even and especially the laity who also have the duty to evangelize because they are a part of the Church.
Let’s stop wasting our time being tricked by some stories. Let’s do our work! We have a lot of work in front of us.
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