c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

Lots of parsons and prelates have placed their highest spiritual threat level on Dan Brown’s best seller, “The DaVinci Code.” This just shows you what happens when supposedly religious figures don’t have enough to do.

They have flooded the market with books that debunk and denounce the novel. Where are these preachers when we need them to condemn such really dangerous tracts as the anti-semitic “The Protocols of Zion,” which has had more reprints than “Gone With The Wind?”

Instead, such distinguished clergymen as Erwin W. Lutzer, senior pastor at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, and author of “The DaVinci Deception,” claim that the novel is “a direct attack against the foundation of the Christian Faith.”

The Rev. James Garlow, co-author of “Cracking the DaVinci Code,” insists that it is not “just an innocent novel. … It is out there to win people over to an incorrect and historically inaccurate view, and it is succeeding.”

If there is good news it is that Catholic bishops have shown good sense in not warning that Communion will be denied to the many Catholics who have read “The DaVinci Code.”

Even strychnine may not have as many fatal side-effect warnings pasted on it. Why, then, do so many Christians not only enjoy the book but find it stimulating to their reflections about their beliefs?

The novel, basically a thriller, centers on the origins of Christianity, interpreting the Holy Grail not as a chalice but proof of a fact, long suppressed by villainous church authorities, that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a conjugal relationship. The novel’s hero and heroine also learn of suppressed gospel accounts that depict Mary Magdalene as a leading influence among the apostles in an era that celebrated sexuality and female wisdom.

Scholars point out the unsure, not to say invisible, historical foundations of much of the plot but most Catholics accept the fiction and say they profit from reading it.

Novels, by their very name, are meant to tell us what is new. What is new here is what is old, the beginnings of the church that have been the subject of popular books recently by the scholar Elaine Pagels and by one of America’s greatest writers, Norman Mailer, whose “The Gospel According to The Son” is an extraordinary tour de force in which Jesus tells his familiar story freshly in his own voice.

Brown speaks to a rediscovery of Christians’ fascination with where they came from. It also touches our present longing for a restoration of our human wholeness. It’s a healing of the division between body and soul imposed by later church officials who had lost touch with the affirmation of humanity that is the essential meaning of the Incarnation. Such ecclesiastics wickedly divided personality into a good soul imprisoned in an evil body, a noble spirit in thrall to the betraying flesh.

The novel reminds us, on its mythic level _ that of fundamental truths told in story form _ that Jesus took on our flesh, just as, in another medium, Mel Gibson’s “Passion of The Christ” emphasizes his flesh and the real suffering that it bore on our behalf.

The popularity of this hardly sinister book is not that it is a good beach blanket read but that it touches deep longings for a religion that recognizes our wholeness and understands that sexuality is a healthy dimension of personality.

Believers are stirred by it, not because it imagines a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but because it allows Jesus to be a man and recognizes how long women, so vital to the early church, have been suppressed by the all-too-human hierarchical church that seems in many ways to be estranged from the church Jesus founded.

Churchmen would do better to examine their consciences on these themes than to indulge themselves, as ill-prepared preachers hastily climbing into their pulpits often do, by condemning a book that seems to be no threat at all to the millions of Christians who have enjoyed it.

MO/JL END KENNEDY