Don’t read or buy The Da Vinci Code, says cardinal

IF you’re not among the millions who have already read the blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, a senior Italian cardinal has a plea for you: don’t read it and don’t buy it.

Genoa Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a friend of Pope John Paul II, said yesterday that the success of the Dan Brown novel is proof of "anti-Catholic" prejudice containing "cheap lies."

Allegations in the novel that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and has descendants have outraged many Christians and have been dismissed by historians and theologians.

"The distribution strategy has been absolutely exceptional marketing, even at Catholic bookstores and I've already complained about the Catholic bookshops which, for profit motives, have stacks of this book," the cardinal said.

The novel is on sale in the Rome hospital where the pope underwent emergency treatment earlier this month.

"And then there's that strategy of persuasion that one isn't an adult Christian if you don't read this book. Thus my appeal is: don't read and don't buy the book."

Asked about commentary that the book's success is "only further proof of the fact that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice," the cardinal exclaimed: "It's the truth."

"There's a great anti-Catholic prejudice," Cardinal Bertone said. "I ask myself if a similar book was written, full of lies about Buddha, Mohammed, or, even, for example, if a novel came out which manipulated all the history of the Holocaust or of the Shoah, what would have happened?"