In the cold light of day, Jack Valero, PR chief for Opus Dei in Britain, and a "numerary" — that is, a higher-echelon member — gazes lugubriously at me in the lobby of 4 Orme Court. "They come in buses with their copies of The Da Vinci Code," he says. "They look up at the windows, hoping to spot Silas. But there are no albinos here, nor monks. No Holy Grail behind the bookshelves."
Opus Dei, traditionally guarded and still suspect because of its links with the fascist General Franco of Spain (five members of the dictator's cabinet were members of Opus), has been plunged by Dan Brown's novel into the eye of vulgar, mass-market curiosity. "Transparency's the best policy," he says. "I invite them in and tell them we're just a Catholic lay group bringing Christ into our everyday lives and work." But if the success of The Da Vinci Code owes everything to a high-octane mix of fact and fiction about the Catholic Church and its supposed history of conspiracy and secrecy, some facts of life in Opus Dei, albino monks apart, are only slightly less intriguing than Brown's fantasy.
According to Valero, numeraries do whip themselves, but they are not allowed to "draw blood". And they do wear a spiked discipline, "but it is only meant to be uncomfortable rather than actually hurt," he says. "We never wear it in the street." And they do give all their earnings, minus essentials, to the organisation: Murray Hill Place, the new Opus Dei national headquarters and conference centre on Lexington Avenue, New York City, was built at a cost of $47m.
The Da Vinci Code excels, however, at taking bits and pieces of the truth, exaggerating and weaving them into outlandish factions, as the readers are taken on a breathless Blyton-for-adults juggernaut: "Secrets, secrets, secrets... Blah! Blah! Blah!" With lashings of blood, hidden treasure, initiates, adepts, scary professors, codes, sexual rites and oodles of unholy twaddle about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Grail being in fact "sang real", namely, blood royal, being their secret holy bloodline... Blah! Blah! Blah! And the Catholic Church wanting to bury all this stuff, which is of course encrypted in the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris. Or is it the church of the Temple in London? Or is it a cave carved out of the living rock under the Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland? And the girl finally kisses her man, a handsome expert on "symbology", destined to be played by Tom Hanks in the planned movie of the book. Blah! Blah! Blah!
The "killer fact" conspiracy of The Da Vinci Code features the Catholic Church attempting to quash through the ages the female nature of God, and a holy ritual involving couples bonking in the inner sanctum. The Knights Templar, according to Brown and a host of historical fantasists, were liquidated by the Inquisition to prevent such "secrets" from coming to light.
But while Brown has exploited a mania for cocktails of religion, conspiracy and mystery, his seductive factions are anaemic compared with the authentic secrets and conspiracies of Holy Mother Church. For such is Catholicism's rich inheritance, it inhabits far more wide-ranging and fascinating dimensions of the mysterious.
Take an alternative blurb: "In the depths of the first world war, Portugal is wracked by a Communist revolution; churches have been burnt, priests and nuns murdered. On May 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary appears to three peasant children in a remote place called Fatima. The size of a doll, and hovering over a bush, she imparts three cosmic secrets. The first predicts the end of the war. The second predicts the coming of another world war if Catholics do not pray to Mary. The third secret is to be entrusted to the Vatican, and revealed on May 13, 1960 by the pope of the day. With trepidation, Pope John XXIII opens the envelope on the appointed date. Stunned by what he reads, he consigns the secret to the deepest, darkest Vatican archive, where it moulders until May 1981. He will not publish it. The rumour spreads that it is the date of the nuclear holocaust. Shortly after the attempt on his life in St Peter's Square, which occurs on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II calls for the long-forgotten secret. He finds that it is a prophecy: that a pope will be the victim of an assassination attempt."
The improbable plot, with its mix of global politics, violence and prophecy, is not pulp fiction, but just one item in Catholicism's huge repertoire of authentic tales of the unexpected. The facts are these: in the autumn of 1980, a Turkish hitman, Ali Agca, arrived in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, having escaped from prison in Istanbul and acquired a Bulgarian passport. He travelled Europe for several weeks, arriving in December 1980 in Rome, where he bided his time. On the afternoon of May 13, 1981, as John Paul was driven through the crowds in St Peter's Square, Agca opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol. One of the bullets tore through the pope's abdomen. Nobody knows for certain who had hired the killer; although it is believed the Soviet Union's president, Leonid Brezhnev, gave the order to the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who enlisted the Bulgarian Soviets.
Recuperating in hospital, John Paul pondered the fact that the attack occurred on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, the anniversary of the day, at the "very hour" that the Virgin had imparted the third secret to the children. Requesting the text from the archive, John Paul discovered that it was about a pope who would be shot by "atheists". The subject of the prophecy, he was totally convinced, was himself. On May 13 of the following year, 1982, John Paul travelled to the shrine of the Virgin of Fatima to place the bullet in the crown of the Virgin's statue. He told the faithful that one hand guided the gun, but it was another, "a motherly hand, which guided the bullet millimetres away from vital blood vessels", which "halted him at the threshold of death".
John Paul's long-held conviction about the interventionist role of the Virgin Mary in history had thus been continued. He came to believe, moreover, that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was linked to all the other messages the Virgin had imparted to the three Portuguese peasant children. Only in 2000 did he finally sanction the public announcement of the third secret. Senior cardinals of the Catholic Church later gave doctrinal legitimacy to the prophecy, confirming that the faithful should give credence to its mighty significance.
Secrets are invariably about power. The Pope's survival indicates he was saved for nothing less than to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union. Hence John Paul emerges as the greatest pope in modern history, his papacy, policies and agendas endowed with mystical certitude. The secret defines and encompasses the 20th century, and the huge forces of good and evil beyond the veil of appearances. The cult of the Fatima secret, for members of the faithful, reveals the power of heaven. But many of Catholicism's secrets stem from the church's history of defence against enemies, from raging Roman emperors, like Valerian, to murderous French revolutionaries; from Elizabeth I's priest-hunters to the Soviet commissars. Hence the imperative for discretion and evasion. Some of the church's most malignant adversaries, moreover, emerged from within — not least the constipated, haemorrhoid-tortured Martin Luther, who had been a Catholic Augustinian monk before he publicly burnt the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law, took a woman into his bed, and sparked the Reformation.
In epochs when Christianity was powerful enough to threaten its opponents, notably Islam, cabals thrived. "Interior" knowledge involved magic spells, potions and astrology culled from the crusading knights' enemies. The church's inquisitors readily ascribed occult practices to Catholicism's perceived enemies; the infamous blood libel against the Jews involved the accusation that Christian children were spirited away to be sacrificed in secret Jewish rituals. Catholicism's most mysterious, treasured object, the shroud of Turin, often believed to be the Holy Grail itself, is a 14th-century fake, according to carbon-dating experts. But worse than that, it required a human model, who was clearly tortured and crucified: almost certainly that model was a Spanish Jew, making the shroud a relic to Jewish rather than Christian suffering.
