DNA - World - Pope publishes answer to 'The Da Vinci Code' - Daily News & Analysis

DNA - World - Pope publishes answer to 'The Da Vinci Code' - Daily News & Analysis
Pope publishes answer to 'The Da Vinci Code'
AFP
Friday, April 13, 2007 20:33 IST



Pope and Da Vinci Code

VATICAN CITY: A book by Pope Benedict XVI to appear in Italian, German and Polish stores on Monday is billed as his answer to popular publications such as Dan Brown's best-selling The Da Vinci Code.

Journalists on Friday received advance copies of the Italian edition of Jesus of Nazareth, which attempts to reconcile the historical figure of Jesus with that of the Gospels.

In the work, Benedict laments "the worst books, which destroy the figure of Jesus and dismantle faith, filled with the supposed results" of scriptural study -- a clear allusion to The Da Vinci Code, which was harshly criticised by the Roman Catholic Church.

"The interpretation of the Bible can become an instrument of the Antichrist" if it goes down mistaken paths, he warned.

The pope, a respected theologian, also denounces "the temptation to interpret Christianity as a recipe for progress and to consider the quest for the common well-being to be the true goal of all religions."

The book is being translated into 17 other languages, and will soon be available in Latin America, where books by Spanish Jesuit liberation theologian Jon Sobrino were recently condemned by the Vatican.

"Wherever God is considered a secondary dimension that you can put aside temporarily or lastingly in the name of more important things, these supposedly more important things fail," the pope writes.

"The negative experience of Marxism is not the only that has shown us that," he added.

The Vatican takes issue with Sobrino for stressing Christ's humanity over his divine dimension, and for presenting Jesus as a figure who was involved in social causes while ignoring his redemptive role.

The book is full of references to problems of the modern world, from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster -- which he said was an example of what can happen when a human endeavour "is not illuminated by God" -- to African peoples who are "robbed and looted" both materially and spiritually to benefit a Western "lifestyle."

The pope began writing the book in 2003 when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and headed the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement body.

He asserts that his account offers a "theological interpretation of the Bible without abandoning historical rigour".

A second volume will concern the birth of Jesus and "the mystery of his passion, death and resurrection," according to the Italian publisher, Rizzoli.

Benedict states in the new book's foreword that it is "absolutely not" part of the papal Magisterium -- or infallible teachings -- but simply an "expression of (his) personal research."

"Everyone is free, then, to contradict me," he wrote.