Mark Massa S.J.’s answer and more…
Thanks to Cathy Kaveny for focusing the discussion! On why The Da Vinci Code see Mark Massa, S.J.’s answer as summarized in a fine editorial in the last issue of Commonweal:
At a recent forum sponsored by Fordham University’s Center for Religion and Culture, Mark Massa, SJ, proposed an explanation for why people find The Da Vinci Code compelling. Catholicism, Massa argued, “represents a corporate culture which is perplexing or dismissed, or even feared, by many Americans, even by many American Catholics.” In its sacramental, hierarchical, and communal commitments, Catholicism challenges the pragmatic individualism that pervades American life. “In the story of salvation, in a very un-American sense, the community is more important than the individual,” Massa said. “We are saved as individuals in and through the community.” In Catholic teaching, the encounter with God is always a mediated experience. Yet for most Americans, the ideal encounter between self and God is an individual and unmediated one. Moreover, Massa notes, “mediation means trusting people who may be wrong.” That entails a respect, even reverence, for institutions, something many of us resist.
The Gnosticism of both The Da Vinci Code and The Gospel of Judas tells us not to trust the church, but to place faith only in ourselves and in our own unique understanding of the truth or of God. Yet as Massa reminds us, individual fulfillment and personal detachment cannot be the final answer. In the Incarnation, God committed himself to the messy business of human history. His spirit remains with us in the community of believers. Trusting in others can prove a mistake, but trusting only in oneself is a tyranny even more absurd than Dan Brown’s albino monks.
This strikes me as entirely persuasive in a broad sense, but not quite on the point of why The Da Vinci Code is so popular now. (This novel doesn’t become the all-time bestseller if published in 1950.) Some larger story, of post 1968 suspicion of institutions in general, and perhaps suspicion of a Catholic Church shattered by the sexual abuse scandal in particular, is surely in play. (And too, the bewilderment or anger many Christians and Catholics feel about the role of women in the church must be important. Perhaps this is why conservatives shy away from speculating on the causes of the book’s popularity, even as they fight the worthy battle of eradicating the novel’s mother lode of misinformation.) Finally, and most disconcertingly for the liberals among us, is the current fascination with “conspiracy,” firmly lodged on the paranoid political right in the 1950s, but migrating to the left since the 1960s. (See a stimulating piece on this point, focusing on John Kennedy’s assassination, in Commentary by James Piereson.)
I think the “corporate” aspect of Catholicism IS difficult for Protestants to understand. “Why does a priest have to stand between you and God,” is a frequent question I get from my Protestant relatives.
Protestants also think many Catholic rituals seem medieval and somewhat “barbaric,” the word my mother, a Unitarian uses. She used to refer to the May crowning at the Catholic church across the street as “virgin sacrificing.” To the uninitiated, it WAS pretty scary, all those little girls in white chanting slowly around the statue of Mary with the Dominicans standing by saying their rosaries.
I also believe that it’s no accident that the heydey of the gothic novels, featuring evil monks and Catholic conspiracies, occurred during the 18th century, which coincided roughly with the Enlightenment, intense scientific discovery and industrialization.
You have some parallels to the 18th century today–DNA research, new discoveries about the cosmos, and the Jesus Seminar–that have helped “ready” some minds to accept Brown’s book as more than just a mystery novel.
Finally, elements within the church mobilized quite quickly to either debunk DVC or to try to explain the scholarship that supports the traditional Catholic view of Jesus. This quickly raised the question among some people that if it’s all such bunk, why is the church trying so hard to keep people from reading it?
I don’t think that’s what anybody in the church IS doing, but I do think they inadvertently fanned the flames of interest among those who already have an ax to grind. The fact that “Catholics don’t want you to read this book” is precisely why my mother DID read it.
Finally, the only people I’ve spoken with who feel there’s anything to the book are disaffected Catholics and Unitarians.
Disaffected Catholics already think the church operates in clandestine ways and tries to keep people in the dark; that’s why they left. To a man, all of them say Brown’s theories about Jesus are bunk, but that the book IS a kind of expose on how the church works.
Also remember that at the time Brown’s book was written, not much was generally known about Opus Dei. The side plot with the mad albino masochistic monk fed a lot of people’s suspicions about that organization.
Unitarians are interested in the book because it’s the nature of Unitarians to talk about religion.
A far far better “alternative life of Christ” book is Anthony Burgess’ “Man of Nazareth.” I read it decades ago as a Unitarian, and it was one of the books that actually moved me to know more about the “real” life of Jesus and helped move me toward the church.
I hope I have not said anything incendiary.
As a student in the American Catholic Studies program at Fordham, I just wanted to point out my delight in opening the Commonweal blog this morning to find “Fr. Massa” as the headline. Fr. Massa, SJ is a terrific professor who engages students in active learning and listening. His classes and lectures are always brilliant and leave students asking for more. His words on “The Da Vinci Code” are right on target
Can Fr. Massa be cloned and his carbon copies placed on the faculty of other Catholic institutions of higher learning, or is that a bioethical issue that should be discussed in another blog entry? :)
Actually, it’s heartwarming to see a student lavish praise on a teacher, especially a teacher “who engages students in active learning and listening.”
So what was so stimulating about the Commentary piece? Wasn’t it typical neocon revisionism?
It is true that Christianity is communal but that response from Massa is as far from the truth as are so many on this blog who should know better. The Davinci Code does a great service for women and is more powerful than what anyone has done so far. In the powerful form of a novel the DC has shown ever so poignantly that the Catholic Church has ignored women pretty much since Magdalene and have used Mary as an escape clause for domineering patriarchs. We know the hierarchy is haughty and perenially more into domination than service. Why don’t We face that?
Go out and talk to people who will not tell you what you want to hear. Massa makes a good point about community but his matching it with DVC is ridiculous.
I shoud have acknowledged these words of John McGreevey above. “(And too, the bewilderment or anger many Christians and Catholics feel about the role of women in the church must be important. Perhaps this is why conservatives shy away from speculating on the causes of the book’s popularity, even as they fight the worthy battle of eradicating the novel’s mother lode of misinformation.)” Why are we not focusing more on this aspect? Then there are McGreevey’s other words: “Finally, and most disconcertingly for the liberals among us, is the current fascination with “conspiracy,” firmly lodged on the paranoid political right in the 1950s, but migrating to the left since the 1960s.” I can understand how this applies to the Kennedy assasination but how does it apply now? Perhaps John can explain further.
Amen, Brother Bill.
I would add that the way Gnosticism is being presented is significant, probably because of what Jean tells us here about Protestant difficulties with certain aspects of Catholicism. The first sentence of the second paragraph quoted from the Commonweal editorial mischaracterizes Gnosticism as a kind of Ur-Protestantism, individualist and anti-communal. So it looks rather like what Jean tells us Protestants prefer, a Christianity without priests standing between us and God.
Gnosticism has been lazily simplified by too many Catholic writers, as in this editorial. What Dan Brown does with it, I do not know yet, but consider it a scholarly duty to find out.
It is a pity that Elaine Pagels is not invited to speak at length on what she thinks her favorite Gnostic texts have to offer us. She is too quickly misrepresented, cubby-holed and dismissed, and that is disgraceful. She is a serious thinker, and she deserves to be heard. She has consistently talked about seeking, and has never suggested that she has a knowledge that others lack. She has never spoken ill of the value of community.
On another matter regarding the popularity of the DVC, Cathy Kaveny’s “perfect storm” idea looks sound and credible. In light of the latest Commonweal cover story, by Barry Jay Seltser, on the plight of the Episcopalians, including his appreciation of how the ECUSA eschews centralization in its polity, and so follows an American federalist pattern, I would add that within American Catholicism too there persists a mistrust of hierarchical authority, and a resentment and even hatred of its secrecy. “Conspiracy” is the wrong word here. That suggests something new and subversive. What apparently the DVC is about, which corresponds closely with many Catholic attitudes about the RC Church, is the way things have always been done from the beginning, an institutionalized opacity intended to cover up a fundamental falsehood in the interests of all who are invested in an elaborate public structure. It is far too weak to call that “conspiracy.” Perhaps better would be systemic evil.
Elaine Pagels can speak whenever and wherever she wants. The Judas Gospel is released, and she has an op-ed in the New York Times. She is the go-to person for all things Gnostic for every journalist in America. She has no shortage of hearings. The idea that she’s being somehow squelched is laughable.
Who has lazily simplified Gnosticism, where, when, and how?
What we need to learn about women is not what the mercenary fictions of Dan Brown can offer, but what a close, unblinkered look at the New Testament can tell us, both about women as Christians and women as Jews.=, and about many other things. There is a marvelous show at the Brooklyn Museum centered around a mosaic discovered in Tunisia in the late 19th century. It was originally the floor of a synagogue. The central inscription clearly indicates that a woman named Julia had it installed at her own expense. A woman at her own expense. The date seems to be early 6th century CE. The curator noted that when he asked whether she would have been allowed to sit there during services with the men, orthodox rabbis responded definitely not. He observed that we adopt practices, for whatever reason, then forget we have adopted them and say that is how we have always done things. Apply that to the history of our won church.