Introduction
By Msgr. Francis J.
Maniscalco
Causing
people to see something they never saw before in a
five-hundred-year-old work of art which is among the most famous and
reproduced of all time is an accomplishment of genius, if that
“something” is a valid new insight. If it is not, then this kind of
achievement usually goes by other names.
The Da Vinci
Code novel contains a claim that in Leonardo’s mural The Last
Supper, which portrays Jesus and his twelve apostles at the meal he
took with them on the night before he died, one of the twelve is not
the apostle John but actually a woman who is Mary Magdalene.
Forget the
Gospel narratives through which Leonardo, like every other
Christian, would have known about the Last Supper and which contain
no mention of Mary Magdalene; forget the fact that this mural seems
to have caused no sensation among the monks whose refectory it
decorated and who would have been as likely to recognize a female
form then as we are today; forget the many paintings of the Last
Supper which show a handsome youth often leaning on Christ’s
shoulder or on his chest following the tradition that identified
John with the unnamed “beloved disciple” of the fourth Gospel. If
such a claim is put between the covers of a book, apparently it
merits respectful consideration no matter how absurd.
What this
novel does to Leonardo’s Last Supper, it does to Christianity as
such. It asks people to consider equivalent to the mainstream
Christian tradition quite a few odd claims. Some are merely
distortions of hypotheses advanced by serious scholars who do
serious research. Others, however, are inaccurate or false.
One false
claim is that the Emperor Constantine, for political reasons of his
own, decided to make a god out of Jesus Christ who was solely a
Jewish rabbi for whom neither he nor his first followers ever
asserted a divine origin. This claim cannot be sustained on the
basis of the existing evidence which demonstrates that Constantine
did no such thing.
It also
highlights the schizophrenia in the The Da Vinci Code about Jesus
Christ. Only if Jesus is divine would we have any interest in the
possibility that his descendant might walk the earth today. If he is
not, such a descendant ceases to be a mythic figure and becomes only
a kind of celebrity child, so many of whom have turned out to be
disappointments to their parents.
Reporters
have asked whether even a bestselling novel can seriously damage a
Church of one billion believers. No, in the long run, it cannot. But
that is not the point. The pastoral concern of the Church is for
each and every person. If only one person were to come away with a
distorted impression of Jesus Christ or His Church, our concern is
for that person as if he or she were the whole world.
Due to the
concern about many current media portrayals of Jesus Christ and the
origins of Christianity, this Web site was developed by the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Department of
Communications, under the direction of the USCCB Committee on
Communications, chaired by the Most Reverend Gerald F. Kicanas, in
consultation with the USCCB Secretariat for Doctrine.
Monsignor Francis J. Maniscalco is a priest of the Diocese of
Rockville Centre, New York who has served the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops since 1993, and since 1995 as
Director of Communications
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