Pope Benedict VI will deliver today his first "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message just as the Vatican launched its scathing attack on two concerns confronting the Roman Catholic Church just in time for the Lenten season: one is a novel and the other one, a "gospel".

A Vatican official, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, whose official title is "Preacher of the Papal Household", on Friday railed against "The Da Vinci Code," branding the book and its upcoming film version as just more examples of Jesus being sold out by a wave of what he called "pseudo-historic" art.

The official, preaching in the presence of Pope Benedict, also condemned the so-called "Gospel of Judas," an alternative view to traditional Christian teaching which has received wide media attention recently.

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We read the Da Vince Code and its accompanying novel, Angels and Demons, but these books never threatened our faith aware of the fact that its author merely tried to intertwine fact and fiction in order to generate interest from prospective readers.

In his sermon, Cantalamessa made several scathing references to The Da Vinci Code, authored by our namesake, Dan Brown, without specifically mentioning the name of the worldwide bestseller. He said that people today were fascinated by "every new theory according to which he (Christ) was not crucified and did not die ... but ran off with Mary Magdalene".

The novel is an international murder mystery centered on attempts to uncover a secret about the life of Christ that a clandestine society has tied to protect for centuries. The central tenet of the book is that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children. Christians are taught that Jesus never married, was crucified and rose from the dead.

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Cantalamessa then turned his ire to the film version of "The Da Vinci Code" starring Tom Hanks, which is due to be released next month. "No one will be able to stop this wave of speculation, which will see a sharp increase with the imminent release of a certain film," he said.

This also reminded us of a film we saw while still in college. The Last Temptation of Christ which contained illusionary scenes of a physical congress between Christ and Mary Magdalene.

But still, we saw the film out of curiosity but it did not diminish our faith.

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Cantalamessa several times dismissed "The Gospel of Judas," which claims that it was Christ himself who asked Judas to betray him. The Gospel of Judas received wide attention recently in media stories about the discovery of a 1,700-year-old copy.

The so-called Gospel of Judas was already declared a heresy by the early Church about two centuries after Christ died.

Well, if there is any beneficiary to the timeliness of the exposure of this so-called "gospel", it is certainly not the church. The prime suspects are those who will be laughing their way to the first banking hour tomorrow somewhere in Europe.

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