They Do Know It’s Fiction, Right?

You would think that the monolithic and powerful Catholic church wouldn’t have much to fear from a novel, even a bestselling one. But the Catholic leadership’s all-out assault on Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code this week is evidence of the effect the book is having among the Catholic faithful. “Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, once a top dogma enforcer in Vatican City and currently archbishop of Genoa, broke the Vatican’s virtual silence on the book this week and told Vatican Radio that nobody should read it and certainly Catholic bookstores should stop selling it.”