The Da Vinci Code: Truth or Hoax?

Public Lecture
Trent University Peterborough
‘The Da Vinci Code – Truth or Hoax’
by Father William Slattery

On Thursday January 26th, 2006 Father William Slattery gave a public lecture at Trent University in Peterborough on ‘The Da Vinci Code – Truth or Hoax?” sponsored by the newly-established Catholic Council of Trent. The lecture was attended by about 200 people most of whom were students, but also members of the local community were present. Among them were various Ministers of Christian Churches and Bishop De Angelis of Peterborough. After the one hour presentation Father engaged in a very open and sincere question-and-answer period with the audience which addressed issues such as the crusades, the inquisition, the male priesthood, feminism and more. Following the official end of the lecture Father remained in the lecture hall to talk to students individually who waited patiently for more than an hour to ask their personal questions.  Below is the text of Father Slattery’s lecture which he is kindly making available here for publication.

Shall we begin with a prayer?

God of Love, who made the Sun and all the other stars,
You are also the God of Truth.
Your Beloved Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus, once said,
“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
That is all we ask this night: to further know the Truth.
We know that as Christians we have not always lived up to the awesome Truth
of accepting Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior,
but we also know that our sin and weakness only makes His Truth shine
 with the blaze of the mid-day sun in the night of this world.
May this evening bring us together closer to Your Son, Jesus,
the Truth in whose name we pray.
 Amen.

The Da Vinci Code: Truth or Hoax?

Bonaparte, Emperor of the French and conqueror of much of Europe, is not a Catholic whom we are ever likely to brag about and want to canonize as a saint. But he was a Catholic and he had that peculiar way of looking at things that Catholics who know the Faith have.

One day soldiers dragged in a man and stood him before Napoleon: “ Majesty, this man  claims he is god.” Napoleon looked at him for a moment and then said: “Take him outside and shoot him – and let’s see what happens after three days.”

In other words, Napoleon had that quintessential Catholic sense of the importance of facts as proofs for ideas. He knew from his Catholic upbringing that faith and facts always go together –even if in very obscure and complex ways – but they never can contradict each other. That is why Christianity has had the lion’s share of the greatest minds that Western Civilization has produced not to mention the lion’s share of the production of Western Civilization itself. Modern physics, human rights, genetics and the university are all owed to Catholicism because this most ancient of institutions has always insisted that faith and reason were born as identical twins.

That is why the Catholic Church and its members can be quite impatient with fluffy reasoning and intellectual nonsense. Although I must confess that I enjoyed the fast-paced rhythm of the “cloak and dagger” plot in The Da Vinci Code, I also many times had the same reaction to the book as my old English composition teacher back in my boyhood days in Ireland.

I can imagine the scene even now: Mr.Breen holding my English composition in his hands would lower his spectacles on his nose and would say: “Slattery, come here!” and the freckle-faced Irish lad would present himself before the desk and look at the page covered in red ink: “Slattery” “Yes sir”. There’s neither head nor tail to this essay.  Do it all over again, all of it!”

Allow me to briefly outline The Da Vinci Code before refuting a few of the errors (only a few because I ran out of red ink) and then allowing you ample time for questions.

The head of the secret society, The Priory of Sion, is found murdered at the Louvre museum in Paris. His niece Sophie Neveu, together with the prime murder suspect, a Harvard professor of religious symbolism named Robert Langdon, are pursued by both the police and the murderer, an albino who is an Opus Dei monk. The entire plot develops within 24 hours and consists mainly in narrow escapes from both the monk and the police before discovering some of the secrets for which the murders had been committed: the tomb of Mary Magdalen and the discovery of the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalen.

Most of the book consists in lectures from Langdon and Professor Teabing about the origin of Christianity.

Supposedly a merely human Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen who was “the sacred feminine”. After the crucifixion, Mary Magdalen with their child, fled to the south of France where their descendants became the Merovingian Kings. Meanwhile Christianity spread through the Roman Empire adding elements from pagan religions until the reign of Emperor Constantine. This Emperor hijacked Christianity for political purposes turning Jesus into a divine figure as approved by the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. Constantine outlawed most of the 80 gospels then in existence and ordered them to be burned since they told the truth about a merely human Jesus. He then took the four remaining gospels and re-wrote them to make Jesus appear divine.

History since then has been one huge cover-up by means of murder and persecution, notably of women, over two thousand years. This is the Christianity that apparently many of you here belong to: the chauvinistic male patriarchal  misogynistic Catholic Church.

Now I recommend every Catholic and Christian to have a copy of “The Da Vinci Code” on your bookshelf because it is loaded – with anti-Christianity. Have it on the same shelf as the Bible – so you can know what both sides are thinking! The Da Vinci Code is an excellent compendium of most of the rocks and rotten tomatoes hurled at us for two thousand years.

Before I go on to answer the errors, let me answer a question many of you may be thinking: Why is the book such a success? Besides being an exciting suspense thriller in spite of the average English and cardboard personalities, The Code is a la mode. It’s fashionable nowadays to belief in half-baked ideas about all religions being more or less the same, Christianity being just one of many options at the buffet.

The Code is also a la mode because as an American Protestant intellectual, Philip Jenkins said recently, “the only acceptable form of discrimination allowed in our society today is anti-Catholicism.”  I would add to that discrimination against our fellow Christians who hold traditional Christianity.

But why do people believe all the so-called “facts” in it about Christianity? Here we come to a more subtle reason best explained by none other than Adolf Hitler: In his book “Mein Kampf” the Fuhrer wrote: “The greater the lie, the greater the chances of it being believed; since most people.., in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, more easily fall a victim to a big lie than a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood would never enter their heads.”

So, friends, if you want a lie to be believed, go for it big-time, invent a conspiracy theory: It reminds me of the old anti-Italian racial slur which said that Italians are backward because of their sunny climate. G.K.Chesterton put it like this: “The argument, as it used to be stated in my boyhood, was so very simple. The Italian sat in the sun under a vine that dropped grapes into his mouth; so he did not need to do anything. The Scotsman had to walk about to keep warm on a cold moorland where nothing grew but thistles; so he was forced to begin to plough the soil if only to restore his circulation. There were some little details that did not seem quite to fit in with the explanation – little things like the Roman Empire,…..”

Or speaking about conspiracy theories and Christianity, the same Chesterton said:
 “One writer against Christmas went so far as to say that the shopkeepers for their own commercial purposes alone sustain Christmas Day. I am not sure whether he said that the shopkeepers invented Christmas Day. Perhaps he thought that the shopkeepers invented Christianity. It is a quaint picture, the secret conclave between the cheese monger, the poulterer, and the toy-shop keeper, in order to draw up a theology that shall convert all Europe and sell some of their goods. (And here comes the punch-line) Opponents of Christianity would believe anything except Christianity……...”

In other words, The Da Vinci Code is à la mode with a corroded code that has a load of politically correct falsehoods. You explode the code by dynamiting it with real history.

It is  important to remember - there is nothing new or original in the “secret” of The Da Vinci Code:  The author really has cooked “meat-loaf” out of the left-over mumbo-jumbo of old anti-Christian conspiracy theories. But he could have done a better job of covering-up. If he says that we Christians have been covering up for 2,000 years, well, try to follow a class act and don’t do such a ‘sloppy Joe’ job. Unfortunately The Da Vinci Code shows little knowledge of art, less still of history and less still of Christianity.

Now I could either refute as many errors as possible during this lecture as I did at the University of Toronto but I have composed a significantly different talk:by showing the falsehood of the two foundations of The Da Vinci Code: Firstly, the four Gospels we have today are lies and secondly, Jesus Christ was only a man and not God. Therefore to explode the code, it’s enough to show the evidence for these two truths – and the code should become a load of wet fireworks. If we show that the Gospels we have today are “the real thing” and that early Christians worshipped Jesus Christ as God, then it’s ‘good-bye’ to the romantic relationship with Mary Magdalen and the cover-up of the Catholic Church down through the ages, to the Priory of Sion, Leonardo da Vinci and all the other tall stories. There is simply nothing left to decode.

1. The authenticity of the four Gospels and the divinity of Jesus Christ

The four Gospel accounts we have today, unlike the so-called Gnostic gospels that The Da Vinci Code says are the real ones, are authentic copies of the original texts which were written by eye-witnesses of Jesus or by those who were close to the eye-witnesses.

How do you know that the Gospels we have today of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the integral texts, that is that they are exactly as they were originally written with nothing added or extracted? After all, two thousand years have passed by. Then how do you know that the authors were eye-witnesses or close to eye witnesses and therefore fide-dogma, worthy of belief?

Firstly, how do we know we have “the real thing” in our Gospels today? We grade the reliability of a present-day copy of an ancient document firstly by answering the question: How many ancient copies of the document do we have in order to know if our version is identical or not? Here are some examples of the most important ancient books whose authorship is generally accepted: For Aristotle’s book,“Poetics” we have 2 ancient copies; for Sophocles’ “Antigone” 4; for Plato’s “Republic” 7; for Julius Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico” 11. Now if you compare these numbers of ancient copies with the results for the Gospels, the difference is stunning. There are 263 integral Gospels in Greek up to the 9th century. This does not include the even more numerous early manuscripts of translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and other languages. If you include fragments of the Gospels, we have some 24,000 ancient manuscripts. Stunning! Result: we know that our Gospels are exactly the same as the originals. If the Gospels are not accepted as genuine, no other ancient document can be accepted as genuine. Reject the Gospels and you have to reject Aristotle, Plato, Homer, Caesar, Sophocles – all ancient writings without any exception.

Secondly we grade our present-day copy on how far apart in time from the original is the most ancient copy we have in our possession today. Again, the answer is impressive. First of all, for the other ancient books: 1,400 years of a gap between our most ancient copy and the original work in the case of Aristotle; 1,000 years in the case of Julius Caesar; 1,200 years for Aristophanes; 750 years in the case of Pliny the Younger. How far apart in time from the original New Testament books are our earliest ancient copies? Within 100 years we have the first copy, known to archaeologists as “The Ryland’s Papyrus” which dates from around 130AD, then the Beatty and Bodmer manuscripts from about 200 AD, the “Codex Vaticanus” “Codex Sinaiticus”,  from the 300s. But we have also recently discovered fragments from about 50 AD, about 20 years from the life of Christ. This is the fragment known as 7Q5 found at Qumran that contains 20 letters in Greek laid out in 5 lines of Mark’s Gospel.

Along with these ancient copies of the New Testament we have a second line of support for the genuineness of the New Testament: the quotations from it used by other writers whom we call “The Fathers of the Church”. How many quotations? Some 86,000 which represents about 90% of the New Testament! One writer alone, Tertullian, writing between 160 and 220 AD quotes the New Testament some 7,000 times. There is no other text close to it in ancient times. And the texts are, with some minor and unimportant changes in punctuation and wording, as you have them today in your Bible at home.

The Gospels are the most highly-proved authentic texts of all ancient literature. If the Gospels are not accepted as genuine, no other ancient document can be accepted as genuine. Reject the Gospels and you have to reject Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Sophocles – all ancient writings without any exception.

We can also show that the early Christians accepted the four Gospels as historically true: Every single Pope with only one exception for the first two hundred years of Christianity died a martyr to witness to the truth in these four Gospels. Some of the greatest minds of the ancient world, such as Justin the philosopher, Tertullian, Origen, were Christians who swore by these Gospels. What does this mean for “The Da Vinci Code”? Well, his accusation that our four gospels were composed in 325 AD by order of the Emperor Constantine no longer has two legs to walk on.

In addition, the so called “Gnostic Gospels” (which I would call the “wannabe gospels”) on which The Da Vinci Code bases its entire story turn out to be parasites of the true Gospels. Why? Because they came after the real Gospels of Mat, Mark, Luke and John! When were the real Gospels written? Scholars vary in the precise dating but it is reasonable in the light of the most recent archaeological finds to say that Mat, Mark, Luke and John were all written by 70 AD. Along with the other 27 books of the New Testament they were respected as God’s Word almost everywhere by about 150 AD.

How do we know that? Proofs from history: Texts of St. Ignatius of Antioch in 110 AD, of St. Justin Martyr 150 AD, St. Irenaeus (who was a disciple of St. Polycarp who had been a disciple of St. John) in 180 AD; all witness to the authority of the scriptures we have today.

The “winnable gospels” don’t have the same track record. The so-called Gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalen, The Pistis Sophia, Acts of Peter were written after the real Gospels, usually some 150 years afterwards. Therefore one judges whether or not they are genuine by comparing them with the four original gospels and if they don’t measure up – which they don’t – then chuck them out, which is exactly what our brother and sister Christians in the early Church did.

By about 150 AD the first Christians had largely decided which books should be included in the New Testament and they rejected most of these “wannabe gospels” as unhistorical and not written by the apostles or those close to them. The Church already looked into the Gnostic writings some 1800 years ago to see if they were genuine. They immediately saw they were not and they rejected them as non-historical and often as downright non-Christian.

Next, we can show that the Gospels we have today were written by Matthew who was an apostle selected by Our Lord and Savior Himself, likewise John and that Mark was the secretary of  Saint Peter and Luke the secretary of Saint Paul. Ancient manuscripts attest to the authorship of the Gospels: a fragment of an ancient text dated by archaeologists to around the year 180 AD, known as “The Fragment of Muratori”, lists New Testament books and states that Luke and John were the authors respectively of the Gospels bearing their name.

The dating of the Gospel accounts: archaeology has lent support to the writing of St. John’s Gospel before 70 AD that is only some 30 years after the resurrection of Christ. Therefore, in conclusion so far we can say that the Gospels we have today are true historical documents written by eye-witnesses. We have no valid reason to doubt their genuineness. There is another reason for asserting that the Gospels are genuine: the behavior of the apostles who were prepared to die rather than renounce their faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God who had resurrected from the dead.

In the Gospel accounts the key proof for the divinity of Jesus Christ that has to be shown to be historical is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection which is not just resuscitation to life of the dead Jesus, but a visible transformation of his human nature by his divinity happened which surpasses our human minds to understand. With regard to this extraordinary event, the key question was asked by someone who was a great Christian as well as a scientific genius, who invented an ancestor of the modern computer, Blaise Pascal. He asked: “If Christ did not resurrect, who made the apostles act like they did?” For two thousand years many men have repeated the same hypotheses over and over again, often contradicting themselves in the doing. But as Pascal himself answered: “I believe witnesses who allow themselves to be killed for what they witness.”
                          
Or as St. Thomas Aquinas brilliantly noted in his Summa Contra Gentiles, if the resurrection did not really happen, then an even more incredible miracle happened: “In this faith, there are truths preached which surpass every human intellect; the pleasures of the flesh are curbed; it is taught that the things of the world should be left behind. Nor for the minds of mortal men to act like this; this is the greatest of miracles… For it would be truly more wonderful than all miracles, if the world had been led by simple and lowly men to believe such lofty truths, to accomplish such difficult actions, and to have such high hopes on the basis of a hallucination or a lie.”

Therefore on the basis of the genuineness of the Gospels plus the fidelity unto death of the witness of the apostles to the truth in those Gospels, we cannot accept as true certain fables in The Da Vinci Code such as that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen and that Jesus was only human.

This concludes our first section.

2. The originality of the Christian faith

The Second Section deals with the statement in The Da Vinci Code: Christianity is nothing original but just a meat-loaf of parts of Judaism and pagan religions.

Now on the basis of section one, we know that to be false: Jesus Christ is a totally unique figure in history who alone of all the founders of religions in all of history ever claimed to be God – and proved it by prophecies, miracles and above all his greatest miracle , the Resurrection.

It is not very scientific to say that Christianity and other religions are the same just because Christianity and they appear to have certain things in common such as prayer, ceremonies, certain symbols, belief in the spiritual world. Two things that have the same shape are not necessarily the same. It is like seeing off in the distance in the twilight  two silhouettes of  a gorilla and Miss Universe and saying that since they have roughly the same shape they must be identical.

The Da Vinci Code also says that Christianity took a great deal from other ancient religions such as the religion of Mithras. So let’s look at the shape of the gorilla. The religion of Mithras was a religion originating in the area of modern day Iran which honored a god named Mithras.  It was, in a later form, a male-only religion. It was, an esoteric cult, that is to say, it believed that meaning to life could be acquired by obtaining secret knowledge from the god or gods. It was not a religion for the masses, but for elites. It was ahistorical, i.e. it had no doctrines which stated any intervention of God in space and time. It had no history. The cult arrived to the West no earlier than 100 AD, which was after the writing of the Gospel accounts and the New Testament. So much for the gorilla – I think Miss Universe is quite different….

The methods used in The Da Vinci Code to try to show Christianity as of pagan origin are foolish at best and strongly prejudiced at worst. In this section, which tries to show Christianity’s origin in paganism, there is a quote from a book, Kelsey’s “The 16 Crucified Saviors”, a shoddy work of 1875 attacking Christianity and rejected even by atheists and agnostics.

Dan Brown alleges that Christianity borrowed from the cult of Krishna. For example, he alleges that the story of Christ’s birth where he was given gifts shows that it took this from the account of the birth of Krishna. Sorry, Dan, but The Bhagavad-Gita (first century AD) doesn’t mention Krishna’s childhood, and the stories of Krishna’s childhood recorded in the Harivamsa Purana (c. 300 AD) and the Bhagavata Purana (c. 800-900 AD) don’t mention the gifts at all. Even if they did, those works were written well after the birth of Christ, making such a claim absurd.

The author alleges that the Christian idea of the Virgin Birth came from the cult of Isis. Well, sorry but that is false too, because Isis was part of a polytheistic cult.  Not to mention that she had 8 children, all gods.

Langdon claims that "the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of ‘God-eating’–were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions." First, it should again be noted that "mystery religions," strictly speaking, did not come into existence in this form until about the end of the first century at the earliest, making it impossible for the first Christians to take, borrow, or steal much of anything from them.

For example, the altar: Altars are a common element in most religions and there are over three hundred references to altars in the Old Testament. Thus, the first Christians, who were all Jewish, would hardly be new to the concept of an altar, especially when the altar in the Temple was a focal point of the Jewish religion.

A sacred meal: Langdon’s reference to "God-eating" is likely an appeal to Mithraism, for it was the only mystery religion that celebrated anything resembling Holy Communion. The differences between the Christian Eucharist and the Mithraic meal can be divided according to the type of each meal and the meaning or context of each meal. The Mithraic meal was not for all in the cult but only for those at a higher level of initiation who participated in a meal together of bread and water (it is debated if wine was drunk). There is no indication that those participating believed they were engaging in "God-eating." The context or meaning was apparently one of an external rite, possibly with some sense of initiation for the purpose of legally belonging to the cult but not with any of the Christian sense of initiation into the life of the Divinity. Mithras was not a Saviour God who had died and risen but a fertility god. The whole Christian concept of the Eucharist was taken from its Jewish and Paschal context.

The DVC alleges that Sunday was stolen from ancient Sun-worship: False. Equally false is Langdon’s declaration that originally Christians worshipped on the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday), but changed to Sunday under Constantine’s influence so that it would “coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.” The implication here is that for nearly three hundred years, until the time of Constantine, the Christians worshipped on Saturday. But the Christians of the New Testament era were already worshipping on Sunday, or the “day of the Lord”, as it is described in Revelation 1:10. This was to honor the day that Jesus rose from the dead; having been crucified on a Friday, his resurrection occurred on the third day.  

Another error: the date for Christmas was stolen from Roman pagan worship. False. Indeed the opposite is true. The date for Christmas existed from centuries before when Christians calculated on the basis of the date of the death of Our beloved Savior (March 25th in the West, April 6th in the East) and on the idea of the “integral age” that he had been born therefore on either December 25th or January 6th. Marcus Aurelius established the feast of the Sol Invictus as late as 270- 275 AD as a means of unifying the sentiments of the masses around a common feast day of the ancient roman gods. Until that date there had been no feast day for any roman deity on December 25th.

The next error: Emperor Constantine changed Christianity, pure and simple into modern day Roman Catholicism. With regard to the distortion of this original Christianity into the male chauvinist, patriarchal, power-hungry Roman Catholic Church, the Da Vinci Code’s thesis is the following: Constantine, in order to gain power in the Roman Empire and then unify it, needed the support of the Christians. With time, the emperor became aware of the potential for strengthening the empire through an ‘improved’ version of this religion, so he decided to create what we now recognize as the Roman Catholic Church by calling the Council of Nicaea and pressurizing the bishops to ‘vote in’ the divinity of Jesus Christ, which they did albeit by a slim majority. The truth is somewhat different, like 180 degrees different.

Error one: Constantine did not need the support of the Christians because they made up a meager five to ten per cent of the population; most of whom were in the lower and middle classes while the army and senate were firmly in the hands of pagans.

Error two: According to Brown, Christianity was changed beyond recognition without more than a whimper in 325 AD. The Christians, according to Dan Brown, just turned their backs on all the key truths they and their ancestors had believed in for three hundred years, because  the Emperor Constantine told them to.

At the Council of Nicaea, there was no argument or vote whatsoever on the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. None. Absolutely none. There wasn’t a question of it. Everyone there as every Christian for the previous three hundred years believed in the divinity of Christ; in fact that was the necessary qualification to be called a Christian. The question which was discussed was Arianism: the belief that Jesus Christ was divine but that he was not consubstantial with the Father. In any case the bishops present were mostly tough old warriors who possibly bore the torture marks of Constantine’s “nice” predecessor Diocletian for not renouncing belief in the divinity of Christ. It is absurd to suggest that these bishops would be swayed by an emperor in essentials. Furthermore, Constantine facilitated the gathering but did not get involved in the theological discussions.

3. Some other false assumptions in the Code

Witches: One of the most spaced-out accusations of The Da Vinci Code is that the Catholic Church burned five million women in the Middle Ages (yes, you heard right) with the excuse that they were witches. These women included, quote “all female scholars”, gypsies, mystics, lovers of nature, gatherers of herbs, priestesses, and any female “suspiciously attuned to nature”, end quote.

Error one: The Church initiated no witch-hunts. “The Spanish Inquisition, for instance, treated witchcraft as a sign of insanity rather than heresy.”  Quite a contrast with many non-Catholic courts! Where witch-hunts were initiated, they were usually started by neighbors of the suspect or frenzied mobs. The book “Malleus Maleficarum”, a vicious work, was not an official book of the Catholic Church. There are rotten apples in every barrel. Even among writers you will occasionally find authors who do not tell the truth.

Error two: The hunts did not take place in the Middle-Ages, but rather during the odious so-called “wars of religion” (1550-1630) which cloaked politics and ambition with religion.

Error three: Where witch-hunts occurred, they indiscriminately pursued both men and women; at least twenty per cent of all suspected witches were male.

Error four: The secular authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants.

Error five: A historian at Oxford University, Robin Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who were found guilty and put to death, had been charged specifically with practicing a pagan religion.

Error six: Instead of the five million that were killed, historians calculate that approximately an average of eight so-called “witches” a week was killed between 1400 and 1800 which is a total of some 40,000. Was that terrible? Of course it was. The unjust execution of a single individual is a horrible crime. But let us not be so pharisaical as to condemn an entire age when the atheistic, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian Nazi and Communist regimes of the 1900s murdered more Jews, Christians and other fellow human beings than all the ages of history put together: some 200 million human beings.
           
The final error that we shall speak about (but believe you me, this list is far from exhaustive): The Church crushed the ancient feminist religions destroying “the sacred feminine” and has oppressed womanhood ever since.

The reverse is true: The Church established the veneration of “the sacred feminine” such as with the respect to The Blessed Virgin Mary, liberated women from the oppression of paganism and set standards which contemporary feminism is still trying to equal. This is obviously a lecture in itself because of its extent, the lack of knowledge about it and the omnipresent criticisms of Catholicism, but we shall just give a few important points.

Firstly a few facts on the so-called “sacred feminine” in ancient pagan religions: The Church did not destroy “the sacred feminine” because it never existed. There was no female goddess: pagan religions were polytheistic. There has never been a matriarchal society. For example, Catalhoyuk, the 9,000 year old Stone Age settlement, according to the analysis of the human bones found there, had a division based on sex of work and implicitly of responsibilities and was  not a strictly egalitarian society. Devotees of Wicca - sometimes known as the goddess movement -- have laid claim to an ancient heritage. Historians now believe that not a single element of the Wiccan story is true.

On the contrary, Christianity brought about the true liberation of women: Revelation proclaimed the equal dignity of woman with man such as in Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female  – you are all one in Christ Jesus”. Revelation freed women from being obliged to physical motherhood as the only way of self-fulfillment when Christianity declared virginal consecration as a vocation for women such as in 1 Cor 7:35.

What has the Church done for womanhood? Here are nine very concrete things that the Catholic Church, i.e. Christianity, did for womanhood that makes Christianity the pioneer of all women’s rights and the institution that has done more for women than all the institutions and governments put together that have ever existed in history.

One: The status of women before and after the arrival of Catholicism was like night and day because Catholicism proclaimed an unheard-of belief in the ancient world: the total equality of male and female. Women are the equal to men in origin, nature and destiny. As St. Paul put it in his letter to the Galatians 3:28:  “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is neither male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.

Two: As regards the difference between the status of women in Christianity and in pagan religions in general, the Church changed the general attitude towards women which was prevalent in some ancient religions as simply being a sex object, cf. Osiris and his sister Isis had sexual relations; Krishna was sexually active having had many wives;  there was ritual prostitution.

Three: In Ancient Rome because of Catholicism the infanticide of girls was eliminated. In the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, in which males outnumbered females by thirty per cent or more, many families refused to raise a second girl. As one husband’s letter put it: “If a girl, discard it.”

Four: The Church abolished polygamy.

Five: Women were far less likely to be forced to have an abortion which was a frequent cause of death for women of the time.

Six: Women from Christian families were three times less likely than women from pagan families to be married before the age of thirteen.

Seven: Christian women exercised greater freedom to choose their spouses because of the economic support available from the Church.

Eight: The Church demanded that husbands be faithful, which was quite a contrast with customs in pagan Rome.

Nine: The Church elevated women just as men to the highest rank in the church: models of Christ-likeness, for example, Mary Magdalen. As the writer Flannery O’ Connor said: “The Church would just as soon canonize a woman as a man, and I suppose has done more than any other force in history to free women.” Partly as a result of this, women of all ranks were conspicuous in the new religion and there was a notable presence in some churches of women of important social status. In the Middle Ages (yes, those “terrible” Middle Ages!), the social importance, power and influence of women rose to such heights the likes of which we still haven’t recovered to this day. Politically, between the 1000s and the 1200s almost every throne in Europe was occupied by or powerfully influenced by a woman, such as the Queen of France, Blanche de Castille. Some women were the equivalent of provincial governors and mayors and exercised power that many men today would envy. They were feudal lords and as powerful as men of the same rank in virtue of their role as abbesses of monasteries, often administering vast territories with villages and parishes. One example is Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete monastery in France. Career-wise, women exercised different professions. In the survey ordered by King Louis IX and others there are accounts of a women teachers, doctors, pharmacists, plasterers, dyers, copyists, salt merchants, a woman crusader, a woman hairdresser, a woman miller and so on. In education women were educated as well as men through the convents. The abbess Hroswitha in Germany, a writer, influenced the development of both the theatre and the German language; the abbess Herrad of Landsberg wrote the best-known encyclopedia, Hortus deliciarum of the 1100s; not to mention the talented musician Hildegarde of Bingen. There were even dual monasteries on different parts of a property where men and women lived separately but were ruled over by women, as occurred in the famous abbey of Fontevrault, founded by Robert d’Arbrissel. How much chance of success do you think we have of reviving that great idea? In the home the woman ruled alongside her husband over both family and property and retained power over what belonged to her from before marriage. In the armed forces, we still have not had a female commander-in-chief since the Joan of Arc was promoted to the position by the Catholic Church.

In conclusion, there is a bright side to what has been called “The new anti-Christianity: the last acceptable prejudice”: it can be an incentive to Christians to learn more about the Faith, the one true Faith which is the one revealed by Him who once said “I am The Way, The Truth and The Life”. The Christian Faith is unique in that it is supported not just by a will to believe but by facts. For two thousand years many of the greatest minds of the world have pondered over the Catholic Faith and have embraced it, from St. Justin, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Pascal, Pasteur and Lejeune. Men such as these did indulge in ignorant and foolish denials of Christianity. As Chesterton said: “Christianity was never allowed to be enough of a success to be properly called a failure….. It ought to show, as it really could show, that social evils have not come from its presence, but rather from its absence.” “It is no disgrace to Christianity; it is no disgrace to any great religion that its counsels of perfection have not made every single person perfect. If after centuries a disparity is still found between its ideal and its followers, it only means that the religion still maintains the ideal, and the followers still need it.” For two thousand years Diocletians, Hitlers and Stalins, mob violence, guillotines, gulags and Dachaus have sought to destroy The Truth; for but the words of The Master spoken in Caesarea Philippi hold fast now and until the world’s last night : “And the gates of hell shall not hold out against thee”.

4. In conclusion

We can, therefore, draw two consequences for our thinking. A Protestant Englishman, the Lion of England, Sir Winston Churchill, sensed this better than many Catholics: On August 23rd, 1944, Churchill returned from a meeting with the Pope to the British Embassy in Rome. Once there, Churchill called his personal physician, Lord Moran, who accompanied him on all his wartime travels and with tears in his eyes recited to his physician the following text about the Catholic Church. Churchill with watery eyes made the comment: “There must be something in a faith that could survive so many centuries and have held captive so many men.”
                       
The second beautiful consequence is that  the moon of truth shines even brighter when surrounded by the darkness of falsehood and the great truth that shines forth is the incomparable truth and  beauty of the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. As regards the truth of who he is, C.S. Lewis, the convert expressed it well: “….I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (cf. C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity, bk.II, chap.3, para.11,13, pp.55-56)

Napoleon Bonaparte expressed the extraordinary beauty of Jesus Christ better than many have. It was in his final years, after the Battle of Waterloo when thanks to the generosity of the British government he was allowed to do a long personal retreat on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, with a British warship circling the island to ensure none would disturb him. The lone Emperor with death approaching reflected on Jesus Christ and said: “I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Shallow minds see a resemblance between Jesus Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance just isn’t there. There is an infinite difference between Christianity and whatever other religion….Everything in Christ astonishes me. His spirit awes me and his will makes me marvel. Between him and anyone else in the world there is no possible point of comparison. He is truly unique. His ideas and emotions, the truth which he announces, his way of convinc­ing, are not explained either by human organization or by the nature of things. The closer I get to him, the more carefully I examine him, I see that everything is beyond me; everything is immense with an overpowering grandeur. His religion is a revelation from a mind that is certainly not human. There lies a deep originality that has created a series of words and sayings hitherto unknown. Jesus borrowed nothing from our knowledge. One cannot find absolutely anywhere except in him such a life. I search vainly through history to find someone like Jesus Christ or anything resembling the gospel. Neither history nor humanity nor the ages nor nature offer me anything with which to compare or explain it. Here everything is extraordinary. The more I consider the gospel, the more I am certain that there is something there which is beyond the march of mere human events and above the human mind.”

To which we can only add “Amen”.

At this point, I invite all to spread the word about the Da Vinci Code by speaking out and forming study groups here at Trent and elsewhere, Catholics and non-Catholics. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody in Canada is free to discuss religion. In practice, it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it. The act of defending Christianity publicly in Canada nowadays has all the excitement of a vice. Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. When the convert has entered the Church he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside. We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.

Corruption in the Church? Yes, there is corruption in the Church, but remember: only a good thing can become corrupted. A corrupt thing cannot become corruptible. And if corruption continues unabated, it destroys what it corrupts. But the Catholic Church has lasted 2,000 years. Why should your conscience be any more reliable than your rotting teeth or your quite special effect of eyesight? What is really working in the world today is not any other religion but anti-Catholicism and nothing else - the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world today.

Father William Slattery
Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
January 26, 2006