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Britain’s Westminster Abbey to correct tourists on ‘Da Vinci Code’

Churchmen at Westminster Abbey have grown so tired of answering questions about “The Da Vinci Code” that they announced Tuesday they would issue information sheets to correct “factual errors” in the runaway bestseller.

The Abbey’s dean and chapter added that the novel by US author Dan Brown was “theologically unsound”. Westminster Abbey features relatively briefly in the book, but the story incorrectly states that visitors can carry out brass rubbings, and that the poet Alexander Pope delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Isaac Newton, the physicist.

The book, about to be made into a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks, follows the adventures of a US professor and a woman French secret agent as they try to uncover the mystery of the Holy Grail amid a cover-up by the Catholic Opus Dei organisation acting on behalf of the Vatican. “Although a real page turner, ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is theologically unsound and we cannot commend or endorse the contentious and wayward religious and historic suggestions made in the book — nor its views of Christianity and the New Testament,” said the statement by the authorities of the abbey, one of the Church of England’s most historic buiildings.

The Vatican has also condemned the book’s theme that Jesus Christ married and had a child as a collection of “shameful and unfounded lies”. “Don’t read it, and above all, don’t even buy the Da Vinci Code,” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the archbishop of Genoa, told Catholics in March. A spokeswoman for Westminster Abbey said that the new leaflets would only deal with factual problems in the novel, which has sold more than 20 million copies in 44 languages worldwide.

“We get a lot of tourists, particularly Americans, asking about the book,” she said. The bulk of the book’s action is set in Paris, which has experienced a mini-boom in tourists following the sites it describes, including the Louvre. “The Da Vinci Code” was named book of the year at the British Book Awards in April. afp

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