Madam, - The hostile response from the Catholic Church to the book and film of The Da Vinci Code is astonishing in its ferocity.
It is a shame that this response has concentrated on highlighting relatively unimportant facts, such as the actual identity of the figure in The Last Supper painting, the existence of the Priory of Sion, the number of panes of glass in the Louvre pyramid, etc. Let us not forget that The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction which the author is using to draw attention to an important historical question - namely, that Jesus may have had a wife.
From my own observations such a possibility is entirely defensible. Jesus was a Jew - which, at that time, would have placed an obligation upon him to marry. He was also said to derive from a royal bloodline and we only have to look at contemporary royal families to see that this would have added extra pressure to his marrying and producing an heir.
Lastly, the absence of explicit evidence in the canonical Gospels to Jesus's wife is altogether to be expected from texts that safeguard the divinity of their protagonist at all costs - in this case by denying him any association with sexuality. Hence, Jesus is a single, asexual preacher - even his conception is deemed to have been achieved without recourse to copulation.
Why is it so threatening to the Church that Jesus may have had a spouse and how beneficial might it be for women in that institution were such a possibility to be properly considered? - Yours, etc,
DAMIAN BRUCE, Hazelwood, Shankill, Dublin 18.