I've been more than a little amused with the minor contretemps that has surfaced over papal preacher Fr. Cantalamessa's "slamming" of The Da Vinci Code in his traditional Good Friday homily, not to mention the apparently shocking denunciation of genetic engineering-cum-tampering, the decline of family life, and other general badness in the Papal Via Crucis meditations.



Neither of these things particularly surprise me. What were they expecting us to say? That the Pope wants to have Dan Brown over to dinner at the Vatican? (Say what you will about heretic Hans Küng, but at least he's a witty dinner companion.) That we luuuuv the idea of transhumanizing ourselves into a biological freak show? That we should just write off the family as an institution? Of course not. The Pope and the preacher were just simply re-stating the age-old line of the Church.

It's funny, really; the media has taken a fairly brief aside in Padre Cantalamessa's homily and blown it up into a Savonarolan diatribe that suggests the Congregation of the Index's armored support column was going to roll into Barnes and Noble any minute now. What the good friar said was,

In a stream of novels, films and plays, writers manipulate the figure of Christ under cover of imaginary new discoveries. This is becoming a fashion, a literary genre.

No Dan Brown, no mention of titles or ISBN numbers. And while certainly Danny Boy is implicated by this comment (and I certainly don't mind a condemnation of the book), it covers a whole stream of other concerns that plague the modern world, from the Gospel of Judas kerfuffle to The Last Temptation of Christ. This, and the reactions to the "attacks" and "slams" in Benedict's quiet, thoughtful meditations read at his late-night Good Friday Via Crucis, remind me more than a little of the Far Side cartoon of the dog who only heard her name mentioned when the humans talked--"blah blah blah Ginger." I wonder what the rest of the homily was about?

I guess the media finds it hard to compute. Doesn't he like Prada, iPods and cats? Didn't this guy just write all about L-U-V and stuff? They forget, I suppose, that the flip side of "God is love," is "The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son," and when you say one, you say the other, and Benedict's all about both.