<div>On 5/21/06, Colin Brace <<a href="mailto:cb@lim.nl">cb@lim.nl</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> [What with DaVinci Code (The Film) showing in a theater near you, what better moment   than now to revist Geoffrey Pullum on Dan Brown?] [...]</blockquote><div> I know that  Opus Dei was not mentioned here but I thought I would take the opportunity to bring them up. </div> </div>What is missed in all of the mass media commentaries on the DaVinci Code that I have read or heard is the real political significance of Opus Dei in the context of Roman Catholicism.  Opus Dei has tried to operate as a network to fight against all those in the Catholic Church who might ally themselves with the poor.  They have of course fought against liberation theology and have tried to reestablish the connection between the State, the business establishment and the Catholic Church in the states where the alliance between State, Church and ruling class was the traditional power nexus.  In main Opus Dei is a kind of traditional Catholic organization that has appeared many times in the history of the Catholic Church.  It is anti-reformist and politically revanchist.  As far as the conspiracy theories that surround it, they are weirdly familiar.  They are simply conspiracy theories about the Jesuits refasioned for global consumer society.  All of the conspiracies surrounding the Jesuits during the period of the counter-reformation made their way into popular culture through plays and novels, in almost the same way that we are now getting Dan Brown's conspiracy theories.  My favorite Catholic writer, Garry Wills, has a good book on Macbeth, called "Witches and Jesuits" that covers some of this territory. Eugene Sue's novels "The Wandering Jew" and "The Mysteries of the People" also are plotted around Jesuit conspiracies that are structurally very similar to the kinds of conspiracies that are spun out about Opus Dei now days.  Apropos nothing: My favorite conspiracy theory is the "Conspiracy of Conspiracies Theories" that is essentially the anti-Catholic view of the world that says the Catholic Church is behind all conspiracies.  This would include everything from the JFK assassination to Iran-Contra.  I can't remember if it was Umberto Eco who suggested this or if I simply derived this from "Foucault's Pendulum."  And speaking of Eco, in the last chapter of his book "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods" gives a history of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which shows how Eugene Sue's novels were plagiarised with Jews substituted for Jesuits in order to give us this anti-Semitic trash. Jerry Monaco