To The Editor:
Two Sundays ago, during a homily at St. Matthews’s church in Plymouth, the presiding priest brought up a very legitimate societal concern. He said, as close as I can remember, that “Christianity is the last acceptable prejudice in America.” I apologize for the lack of definitive quotation; however, I believe the general idea gets across. Namely, the societal and media bias toward Christianity has become ridiculous, and it is personified by the lack of criticism by non-Christians and non-Catholics toward Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. As a point of comparison, let’s remember when The Passion of The Christ came out. It was decried as anti-Semetic, and those of us who disagreed were considered ignorant. I saw the movie and heavily critiqued it for anti-Semetism, but saw only the true history of the last day of Jesus Christ’s days on Earth as described by The Holy Bible. The Romans were portrayed as far worse than the Jewish elders and other Jews. Another point of comparison is the recent controversy over the Denmark cartoons depicting Mohammad. This is a grave offense in the Muslim religion, punishable by death. (Am I the only one who noticed Jesus was also depicted with a bomb on his head, not just Mohammad, in one of those cartoons?) Given this religious law, Muslims cried out for the deaths of the dozen cartoonists. Many I spoke to about this defended the actions of the Muslims, as did much of the media. Their logic included the logic of “this is their religion…” This brings us to the Da Vinci Code, which is a fiction book that promotes itself as having factual evidence in it of all its mentioned historical artifacts. With much of the Catholic and Christian world angry about these falsities, are we getting support? Nope. We are just Catholics who, as I’ve been told, “don’t understand” that it’s a work of fiction. Don’t worry, we do. Catholics such as myself, however, are tired of the double standards. When 9/11 happened, everyone I know who was my age told me to learn that Islam is a religion of peace, not violence. (Current evidence says otherwise). Yet when President Bush uses the occasional religious reference when referring to missions in Iraq and/or our troops, he is declared to be a religious zealot. Since when does defending people against terrorists make one a zealot? To finish, I hope people read what I said and not how I said it, whether you be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, or of any other faith.