Da Vinci Code Handout and Protest (Updated 5-24-2006)

UPDATE: Our handouts (see below) made their debut on Saturday afternoon, when a group of about 55 or so from our chapel stood in front of a theater to pray and protest “The Da Vinci Code.” The police showed up when a 19-year-old girl complained that she had been accosted with a handout. The two officers were Catholic and commended us for what we were doing. They left the scene of the crime with some of our tracts (for their own reading, not as evidence) and an invitation to come to the Traditional Mass at our chapel.

The press also showed up and we actually got a cover story in the Sunday Edition of the Keene Sentinel. (Here is the Keene Sentinel piece.)

All things considered, it is a pretty fair article. There was one factual error: Brother André Marie did not tell the reporter that he had read the book. The journalist inferred this from the fact that Brother knew some things about it. The Sentinel also got our numbers a bit wrong. There were — at one time, anyway — more like 55 people. (Some had probably left by the time the reporter showed up. We were there more than three hours.) The thing toward the bottom about our making the theater’s business pick up is rather silly. More people see movies at night than during the day. However, even if we had helped attendance, there is a bigger issue here: Catholics must react in holy anger at this outrageous blasphemy against our God and our Church.

Speaking of the Da Vinci Code, we can credit Dan Brown with getting one thing right. If you’re going to attack Jesus Christ, you may as well go all the way and attack His Church at the same time. Jesus Christ and His Church form but one — the “Whole Christ” as St. Augustine put it. At least Brown shows who it is that the world hates. “If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you” (John 15:18). What, with all the ecumenism, some folks may have forgotten about that!

Da Vinci Code Handout

Yes, it’s rather “plain Jane,” but the brothers have put together a legal-size handout for use at Da Vinci Code protests. Most of the material was gratefully garnered from the public domain resources available on the davincioutreach.com web site. We have supplemented this information with some facts from Gary Potter’s article, Gnosticism Sells Big, and supplied some brief arguments of our own. We recommend staging Rosary Rallies of reparation and public witness in front of theaters playing the movie. You can find out about such activities here. Take plenty of our handouts along!