Question: What does the Church think about the book called the DiVinci Code? Does the Church believe in the other gospels that are supposedly out there like the gospel of Mary Magdalene? Is the book ok to read?

First of all thank you for your question. The book by Dan Brown, called The DaVinci Code is a work of pure fiction. It was written as a novel rather than a historical text, although the author himself does have some odd beliefs and understanding about Church history and doctrine. If you read it simply as a work of fiction, then there seems to be little harm in it. However, if the claims in it were believed to be true, then they need to be addressed. It is true there were other “gospels” written (like the Gospel of Peter). In fact there were many religious letters and books written in the early history of the Church. What is important is why did some books make it into the official canon of the Bible, while others didn’t? The Councils of Carthage and Hippo at the end of the 400s basically put together the canon of the Bible we know today. This canon was reaffirmed at the Council of Trent in the 1500s in order to counter the canon put forth by Martin Luther (he removed 7 books from the Old Testament. In the end, the magisterium (the authoritative teaching body of the Church made up of the Pope and the bishops in union with him- see Matthew 16: 18-19), picked which books were divinely inspired and without error, and which were not. This was done through the power of the Holy Spirit promised to the Apostles in John 14: 26. We need to realize that the Church precede3d the written New Testament and that the Bible gets it’s authority from the Church, not the other way around. So when the Church discerned that some books were divinely inspired and some were not, we can trust that the Holy Spirit was guiding them. So don’t get caught up in the fictional tales of a modern book, instead trust in Jesus and the His Body, the Church. For more information on this topic read Amy Welborn’s book, De-coding DaVinci from Our Sunday Visitor Publications (www.osv.com/davinci).