Strange how, what its author acknowledges is a work of fiction, has such an effect.
John and Mary Turner

I am in a Reading Group in our village, and one of the books we read was the Da Vinci Code. Most of us thought it was badly written, one or two non-Church goers thought it might be true, the Anglicans for the most part were not impressed and I, a convert about seven years ago, thought if there was still a list of banned books I was sure it would be on it! The first thoughts I had about it "blasphemous rubbish" I still stand by, but I guess that non-believers or anti-Christians would delight in it. It is work of fiction, and I found it far less believeable than The Lord of The Rings.
Doreen Maynard
St Joseph's Seascale

It's hard to nail lies! And it's sad that someone has made a fortune out of pesudo-theology as well as spawning a whole industry on the topic. The Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code at first sight seemed good and balanced to me
Patrick Fitzgerald Lombard, O.Carm

The DVC certainly seems to have seized the minds of those with not enough to do. If Jesus did marry, which seems doubtful, it would surely have been documented by someone! The DVC made me laugh because it was so predictable. Secret societies have ever been beloved by conspiracy theorists. The Church has had a fair few of her own. More than a fair few, if the late Malachy Martin SJ is to be believed. (We read "The Pope's Armada" by Gordon Urquhart, with equal awe and fascination and a certain disgust too. Opus Dei seems to have become a bit like a Catholic Freemasonry. As a family, we reject the secrecy and deplore the reality.
Georgina Prothteroe Beynon

I have read the Da Vinci Code and enjoyed it for it is a good suspense thriller. It did not raise any issues with me
J Swarbrick

The main point to remember about The Da Vinci Code is that it is FICTION, although as usual set into a frame with some basis in reality or legend. The author does provide a page of factual background, but it amounts to very little and is uncontroversial. As represented in the text, his attitude to the Catholic Church is thoroughly respectful. He appears to dislike Opus Dei, as for that matter do plenty of Catholics, and has it sentenced to severance from the Church under a radically liberalised Vatican administration. He presents the (fictional) bishop heading the organisation as induced by the prospect into providing the means towards uncovering a secret, in the expectation of using it to defeat forces that he believes are set to ruin the Church.
In this the bishop is the dupe of a fanatic convinced by the thesis that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were the progenitors of a lineage persisting to the present day, and that the doctrine of Jesus's divinity is a fabrication to be exposed at whatever cost it takes. The chief premise of the plot is that a mass of documents attesting this thesis has been preserved by a secret society, in a location given as the final solution to a chain of linked puzzles. As is stressed in the story, such a premise if true would shatter the foundation of orthodox Christianity. However, it is essentially a "What if ...?" postulate of the kind common in imaginative writing, and there is no more reason to believe it than the idea of Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds.
Peter Wilson.
P.S. This from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on the internet. Prieuré de Sion, usually rendered in English translation as Priory of Sion or even Priory of Zion, is an elusive protagonist in many works of both non-fiction and fiction. Although it has been characterized as anything from the most influential secret society in Western history to a modern Rosicrucian-esque ludibrium, it is generally believed that the Priory of Sion is in large part an elaborate hoax.