Cashing-in the work of the Church

Are we committed to beauty and truth in art? Thinking about Dan Brown's books which contains Catholic "material" I have been a bit distressed at some peoples' an uncritical acceptance of what I think is mostly scandalous regarding the Catholic faith. To me it is not OK because Brown is, as it's said belowi, cashing in on the work of the Church. But my gripe is that fiction is always received as such by some people aren't able to clearly discern the meaning of things. That is, there are people who can't separate fact from fiction in printed materials; for them anything in print is true. Right, it's ludicrous but people do think that what Dan Brown writes is true and beyond reproach. Father John Wauck, an Opus Dei priest, is a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, and the author of the blog "The Da Vinci Code and Opus Dei" said the following recently in an interview the rest of the interview was published on Zenit.org.

Dan Brown's trying to sell books by offering a "cocktail" of history, art, religion and mystery, and, in today's world, there seems to be only one place where he's able to find all those things together: in the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, he's cashing in on the culture of the Church.

Universities are an invention of the Church. Copernicus was a Roman Catholic cleric, and he dedicated his book on the heliocentric universe to the Pope. The calendar we use today is the Gregorian Calendar, because it was promulgated by Pope Gregory XIII, who was working with the best astronomers and mathematicians of his time. Galileo himself always remained a Catholic, and his two daughters were nuns. One of the greatest Italian astronomers of the 19th century was a Jesuit priest, Angelo Secchi. The father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel, was a Catholic monk. The creator of the "Big Bang" theory was a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaitre.

In short, the idea that there is a some natural tension between science and the Church, between reason and faith, is utter nonsense. Nowadays, when people hear the words "science" and "the Church," they immediately think of Galileo's trial in the 1600s. But, in the larger scheme of things, that complex case --which is frequently distorted by anti-Catholic propagandists--was a glaring exception. There's a reason why critics of the Church are always brings it up: It's the only example they've got. So, when we hear the words "science" and "the Church," we should think Copernicus, Secchi, Mendel and Lemaitre. They're representative. Galileo's trial is not.