Da Vinci strikes again.

I’m going to leave the Witnesses alone today, because the Catholic Church has once more made a public fool of itself.

Dan Brown’s wad of tripe, the Da Vinci Code, is to be made into a film. A film that, like the book, would have made no more than a modest impact on the world if left to its own devices.

However, the Pope’s head of propaganda, or whatever he’s called, has once more villified the story as lies, and insisted that Catholics boycott the film. You can’t buy publicity like this. Dan Brown and the film’s producers must be thanking God – for doing their job for them.

Best of all, take a look at this.

An English Catholic group has had the sense to play it calm over the proposed boycott. However, they are annoyed that the film will not carry a notification that it is fiction.

Seriously!

I doubt there was such a disclaimer at the start of A Clockwork Orange. Nor Hellraiser, parts one to ninety, or wherever that one’s got to. Halloween, The Grudge, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Spongebob Squarepants. None of these films, I’ll bet, state that they are works of fiction.

How stupid do you have to be, then, to assume that all those films are true stories?

Dan Brown’s book is FICTION. Anyone with half a brain can see that, and for the rest of you, Dan Brown himself has stated this fact.

If you’re a Catholic, consider this: The high chiefs of your church consider you to be so ill-informed, so gullible, so idiotic that you have to be told that this story isn’t real. They actually think that if you see this, you might be shocked and dismayed.

Are you really so carefully wrapped against the world? Can’t you decide for yourself?

Naturally, some people won’t want to see it because they consider it insulting. Fine. I won’t see it because I don’t consider it interesting. That’s fine too.

I am not, however, going to presume to tell anyone else what they can and cannot choose to see.

That’s not religion. That’s totalitarianism.