Book Title: The Third Secret
Author: Steve Berry After Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code’s success, it was inevitable that a spate of similar inside-the-secret-world-of-religion books would follow. What better target than the Catholic Church with all the rumours of centuries of hidden and arcane knowledge stored in the Vatican and only available to a few fusty priests buried in oaths of secrecy and years of devotion to the Church. Into such a mythic, apocryphal world, comes Monsignor Colin Michener, a former papal confidante and lead character of Steve Berry’s, The Third Secret. The Third Secret is based on the Catholic belief in the appearance of the Virgin Mary to three peasant children in the Portugese town of Fatima in 1917 and the notion that three secrets were revealed by the divine presence, only two of which were immediately published to the world. The book’s premise is that sinister forces have worked within the Church to prevent the release of the third secret. All of the usual suspects are here in this novel: the sinister megalomaniacal senior cleric eager to do anything to prevent renewal in the Catholic Church, the greedy priest whose allegiance to “manna” overwhelms any allegiance to his God and the holier-than-though hero powerbroker whose love for Mother Church will assure continuance of the Vatican. Most irritating of all is the mandatory priest (or in this case, Monsignor) who can’t keep his vow of celibacy. To me, much of society’s insistence that most Catholic priests can’t fulfill their vows of celibacy is symptomatic of a society that believes that unless we all bed-hop like some sort of clan of rabbits, then we can’t be normal. It is the religion of “modern” sexual worship insisting that no-one values celibacy and being damned angry if anyone is! That Berry has pandered to that childishness in this novel is quite sad. Naturally celibacy isn’t for everyone and this writer has never sought to be celibate himself, but to insist that people who embrace it as a lifestyle, cannot adhere to it, seems to me a type of arrogance and denial of a person’s right of freedom of worship. That the “good” former pope in this novel had always wanted to experience his love of a particular woman (even if platonic) and his equally good and leading character of Monsignor Michener had actually broken his vows of celibacy appears to be a criticism of the Catholic priesthood, most inappropriate in a novel. Had this book taken on a less tolerant religion or indeed fundamentalist elements of a religion, and parodied them in a like fashion, I doubt that Mr. Berry would be leading a peaceful life. The Third Secret is published in Australia by Random House.
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