Blessed are the spin doctors

Austen Ivereigh, who is leading the battle against the movie of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code in this country, reveals how its principal target — the controversial Catholic organisation Opus Dei — is turning the fight to its advantage

Rome

In the run-up to the release of the film of The Da Vinci Code on 19 May the communications director for the UK branch of Opus Dei, a bundle of nervous energy even in calmer times, can hardly contain himself. ‘This is going to be the most exciting month of my life,’ Jack Valero grins, as he passes me a bundle of some of the astonishing recent coverage: pages and pages from Time magazine, Le Figaro, the New York Times, Eve — upbeat coverage getting inside the ‘real’ Opus Dei, contrasted with the murderous conspirators in the Dan Brown megaseller. The articles explain the difference between numeraries (celibate members) and supernumeraries (normally married); why they joined this Catholic organisation of 86,000 worldwide dedicated to finding God in their daily work, and how, when you meet them, they are not sinister albino monks but prayerful insurance clerks of conservative temper.

You can’t buy this sort of publicity. But should you ever find yourself cast as the central villains in a film based on a novel that has sold 40 million copies and is about to be one of the most widely watched films in history, you can, at least, enable it. When that novel takes as its premise the ‘revelation’ that for centuries the Catholic Church has covered up the ‘truth’ that Jesus Christ fathered a line of children through Mary Magdalene — and, even more astonishingly, when people actually believe this stuff — why not step out into the spotlight and let people see you as you really are? Opus Dei calls this ‘turning lemon into lemonade’ and in the weeks before the film is released it is producing it in industrial quantities.