Could Da Vinci Code be read by Mature Catholics? And what about Potter?

See also: Creation vs. Evolution : Trent Horn Wrong https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/01/trent-horn-wrong.html

Here is Trent, again:

Fr. Ripperger, Harry Potter, and Healthy Skepticism
TRENT HORN • 9/5/2019
https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/fr-ripperger-harry-potter-and-healthy-skepticism

Now, here’s the thing. If it is the work of the devil, if it is demonic in nature, I will wholeheartedly oppose it, because here’s the thing. If something is demonic or it’s opposed to the faith, and the public at large accepts it, I don’t care. People love The Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code is a horrible novel. It’s garbage. Father Ripperger says Harry Potter is garbage. I don’t know. I haven’t read the books. I know The Da Vinci Code is a poorly written novel. The movie did terrible because it’s… Everyone agrees it’s not a good story and terrible characters. But the American public, the worldwide public has a propensity for tasteless, bad things. I’ll say that it’s bad and The Da Vinci Code undermines people’s faith even if millions of people buy the books. What I need to hear is evidence, good reasons to show that something popular is antithetical towards our faith, is spiritually injurious or dangerous to people.

I actually first read the book up to where Teabing starts his blasphemies (which they largely are). I laid it aside. In 2005. I reread it, after 2015. It seems Teabing was after all the actual bad guy. The man putting up poor Silas to murder and spying.

The author of the novelist as narrators utters no blasphemy. He leaves that to Teabing and to a lesser degree his dupes Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu. Though it seems her relatives agreed with it before ...

I have also read Angels and Demons. Again, the view of the Assassin is not in so many words endorsed by the narrator voice. But parts of what he says is again believed by Robert Langdon.

There are really bad things said in these books, and while they are said by characters and not narrator, as readers would tend to identify with Robert Langdon and he is one of the characters, and even in a sense the main one, his mistakes could easily become the readers.

There are two hypotheses possible about Dan Brown. He hoped that the Anticatholic stuff should be so parodic that people looking it up would cease to believe it and convert - or he hoped that people would believe it, if not the more gruesome perspectives of Assassin or Teabing, at least the milder forms more tolerant of Catholicism (if it turns out tolerant!) embraced by Langdon.

I somehow think, through normal procedures of "reader manipulation" that it is the latter, though.

That said, both can be read with some relish over the parodic statements and Da Vinci Code can be read as a family being dupes to the Priory of Sion and this being a heretical and masonic sect. We need not believe it just because Sophie and her granny believed it.

That said, I don't recommend people reading it with too much relish. Once may be enough to know what it is about.

However, "horrible novel", "garbage", "poorly written", "not a good story and terrible characters", "tasteless" - as long as this remains in the critical vocabulary for novels that are not promoting vice or attacking the faith, it means nothing - and in fact Clement XIII* is more flattering of the litterary talents of Voltaire et al. if you read this:

Then consider how they sprinkle their writings with a certain refined splendor, a seductive pleasantness of speech and allurement so as to penetrate more easily into the readers’ minds and infect them more deeply with the poison of their error. Thus they will give the snake’s poison in the cup of Babylon to the unwary who are seduced and blinded by their smooth speech and so do not recognize the poison that kills them.

Unfortunately, this could well be true of Dan Brown's novels, in their intentions, and if not, he is callous to thousands if not millions of readers taking his irony for well researched facts. I said I read them, I did not buy them. Borrowed, he gets less, but he gets some, as libraries have deals with book sellers, including his.

Now, even so, perhaps one Catholic per parish should read them, not to warn the others not to read them, they should normally not anyway, not to decide on whether they should allow others to know they exist (I am no friend of Jewish style gatekeeping, whether done by actual Jews or Vatican II-ers), but to know what kind of "critics" or enemies we are likely to face.

Now, for Harry Potter, I think it is wrong to portray magic as not wrong, as do Rowling and Janusz Korczak in Kaytek the Wizard, and I think it is right to portray it as wrong for mortals (angelic beings having such powers inherently), a line pursued by Tolkien where every mortal using magic either is or risks being spiritually hurt and ultimately to damage of soul and body, or by C. S. Lewis (unless we take too hardly that Lucy was saying a spell in Voyage of the Dawn Treader - but she did not do this in this world and the lesson was, and it is needed for the magicians that alas are, as well as for wannabes, that if a thing is wrong, it doesn't become noble and right and spiritual for being done by magic**), or by Preussler, where the point of the plot is, Krabat gets out of magic, which would otherwise have damned his soul.

But there is something to be said for magic not being the point as much as the "machinery" or "setting" in Harry Potter.***

This brings us to the question whether the non-magic morals of Harry Potter are acceptable. I am not at all sure young people should be encouraged to model loves and friendships on Hermione and Harry and Ron. I have not read the books, but if I did, I suspect that I might harder things to say about these than Trent Horn on Twister when played by adolescents or adults.

Hans Georg Lundahl
St. Maur des Fossés
St. Vincent, Deacon and Martyr
22.I.2020

Valentiae, in Hispania Tarraconensi, sancti Vincentii, Levitae et Martyris; qui, sub impiissimo Praeside Daciano, carceres, famem, equuleum, distorsiones membrorum, laminas candentes, ferream cratem ignitam aliaque tormentorum genera perpessus, ad martyrii praemium evolavit in caelum; cujus passionis nobilem triumphum Prudentius luculenter versibus exsequitur, et beatus Augustinus ac sanctus Leo Papa summis laudibus commendant.

* See his Christianae Reipublicae, encyclical from 1766
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/clem13/c13chris.htm

** See also a Father Brown story with a fakir ...

*** Dito for Shazam ... the story is not about Billy Batson "making a deal" as much as about him getting the eternal - sigh - mentor and getting a lot of occasions to fight evil. The deadly sins are given in a fake list, "selfishness" taking the place presumably of gluttony (which some US Americans have a hard time seeing as a deadly sin) and "injustice" may be a replacement or simply an euphemism for inchaste sins. But the other five are given as usual, and Captain Marvel is there to fight them. I just read Bill Smith's new version in French translation.