Catholic Church Running Out Of Steam?

"Church Fights Da Vinci Code Novel"
"Vatican Assault On DaVinci Code"
"Vatican Officially Denounces The DaVinci Code"
"Cardinal´s Plea: Do Not Read DaVinci Code"

Oh my Gosh, there´s a lot of noise in the media about the Catholic Church disparaging the world´s no. 1 selling novel--DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. As a matter of fact, looking at the headlines, the "disparage" verb I used is a very diplomatic term indeed... For it seems the soft spoken language that usually comes from the Catholic Church officials is anything but diplomatic. It´s quite offensive. Can anybody tell me, why did the Vatican go crazy about some mainstream novel instead of trying to tackle some really important issues the Catholic Church has been facing over the last decades? With the number of Catholics declining, financial as well as sexual abuse scandals on the rise, and the Pope presumably at his eleventh hour, I just don´t get it! Helooo! You guys are obviously trying to perform an operation on the patient using the heart bypass surgery, but guess what--the patient is dying on cancer!

De-coding DaVinci

The Da Vinci Code, by US author Dan Brown, has been a publishing sensation around the world and is still in best-seller lists. Its conspiracy theories and thriller style, in which two code-breakers try to track down the truth behind the Holy Grail, have caught the imaginations of millions. Its central claim is that the Holy Grail is really the bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene - which the Church is supposed to have covered up, along with the female role in Christianity. Brown has previously said: "All of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact."

Vatican Lost It

"The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true."
"Christians should not buy or even read the best-selling thriller."

One Particularly Interesting Fact

The strongest Vatican critic of the novel, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa, Italy, is among those seen as a likely successor to the ailing Pope John Paul II.

My Last Word

Considering the whole picture from a marketer´s point of view, this is a textbook example of how a public effort, no matter how much successful or legitimate, to take on something that is merely commercial (in this case a book), is going to rather burnish the sales and overall popularity/hype that is already quite significant. For me, Dan Brown is a genius. Completely fabricated or not, the novel proved one thing--that the Catholic Church is far from its own resurrection.