Maureen Dowd, The Da Vinci Code, & The Vatican

THE DA VINCI CODE: Vatican should cool down and read to the end of the book

Now that "The Da Vinci Code," the two-year-old thriller by Dan Brown, is a publishing miracle - with 25 million copies sold in 44 languages, a cascade of other books inspired by the novel and a movie with Tom Hanks set to start filming this spring - it's a little late for Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to intone on a Vatican radio broadcast: "Don't read and don't buy 'The Da Vinci Code.' "
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The church refuses to allow women to be ordained as priests because there were no female apostles. So if Mary Magdalene was a Madonna rather than a whore, the church loses its fig leaf of justification for male domination and exclusion.

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