Isn't Da vinci like some of those books which claim the holocaust never took place?

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A top Vatican official close to Pope Benedict urged Catholics to boycott the upcoming film “The Da Vinci Code,” calling the book on which it is based anti-Christian and full of lies.

Archbishop Angelo Amato, No. 2 official in the Vatican doctrinal office once headed by the pope, told a Catholic conference in Rome the blockbuster book is “stridently anti-Christian ? full of calumnies, offences and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the church.”

He added, according to Reuters: “I hope that you all will boycott the film.”

Amato said the book, which has sold 40 million copies worldwide, owes its success to “the extreme cultural poverty on the part of a good number of the Christian faithful.”

The Sony Pictures film, starring Tom Hanks, premieres next month at the Cannes film festival in France. It opens in U.S. theaters May 19.

Much of the controversy surrounding the book and the film is the proposition that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The story line claims she had a child with Jesus ? an heir that became France's royal bloodline. It further suggests Catholic secret societies hid these and many other secrets about Jesus. It supposes Leonardo Da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton were in on the secret. Da Vinci, the book says, tried to covertly alert the world through his painting of “The Last Supper.”

Amato today said Christians need to be more forthright in rejecting “lies and gratuitous defamation.”

If “such lies and errors had been directed at the Quran or the Holocaust they would have justly provoked a world uprising,” he said.

He called for an organized boycott to the film similar to the effort against Martin Scorsese's “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988.

The Catholic group Opus Dei ? depicted in the film as conspiring to cover up the truth about Jesus ? has asked Sony Pictures to include a disclaimer emphasizing the movie is fictional.

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