03/09/2006

Catholic Initiative Supports Disclaimer for Controversial Film: The Da Vinci Code
Catholic League’s Open Letter to Ron Howard is a Just and Right Request

ENCINITAS, Calif., Mar. 9  -- Da Vinci Outreach, a national initiative to expose the anti-Catholic lies in the upcoming movie The Da Vinci Code, is joining the request made by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights for director Ron Howard to clearly state that his film is a work of fiction.

This week, the Catholic League ran an ad in the New York Times (http://www.catholicleague. org/linked%20docs/Da_Vinci_ad.htm) calling on Ron Howard to have the decency to do what Dan Brown, author of the novel, did not do: declare up front and in no uncertain terms that the movie is fiction. The letter written by William A. Donohue, President of the Catholic League states: "As the director, you have a moral obligation not to mislead the public the way the book's author, Dan Brown, has. Putting a disclaimer at the beginning of the film noting that this is a fictional account would resolve the issue."

Da Vinci Outreach, a coalition of Catholic organizations, is also requesting that Ron Howard include what many books and movies contain—a simple disclaimer that his film is a work of fiction.

"When there are references that could be confusing for moviegoers the customary way to deal with the confusion and eliminate offense is to clearly state that the people and events depicted are fictional," said Matthew Pinto coalition member and president of Ascension Press. "Disclaimers are commonly used in books and movies."

Da Vinci Outreach ( www.DaVinciOutreach.com) was established to help readers and moviegoers do what the movie’s trailer hypocritically urges viewers to do: "Seek the Truth." It offers resources to help viewers navigate between fact and fiction, including the book The Da Vinci Deception: 100 Questions and Answers about the Facts and Fiction of The Da Vinci Code.

"Dan Brown weaves a story around so-called ‘facts’ most of which can easily be disproved with a quick Google search. He does all of this under the umbrella of free speech and completely disregards the fact that with this right comes responsibility as well. But he had to rely on a lot of untruths because, in his case, they make more money than the truth," said Da Vinci Outreach spokesperson Dr. Pia de Solenni, formerly director of Life and Women’s Issues at the Family Research Council.

The numerous factual errors in The Da Vinci Code include:

That a secret society, the Priory of Sion, kept the "untold truth" about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The fact is, this tale has been exposed as a hoax concocted in the 1950s by an anti-Semitic Frenchman who was sent to prison for fraud. That Opus Dei is an evil "religious sect." In actuality, it is an official Catholic organization founded to help laypeople (it has no monks) seek holiness in their daily lives. References to "the Vatican" eleven centuries before it even existed. That the book (and hence the movie) is based on documents that are factual. The truth is there is not a hint of historical evidence for its claims.

What Davinci Outreach and the Catholic League are requesting of Ron Howard is merely a customary statement such as this: "This is a work of fiction. All information is the creation of the author's imagination. All persons, alive or dead, or events portrayed or depicted in this story are fictional and any resemblance to real people, organizations or incidents is purely coincidental."

Now, that would be the truth