To mark the saint’s feast, celebrated July 22, and in light of the continuing interest in Brown’s novel, the Catholic Enquiry Office in London has set up a Web page filled with information about the real St. Mary Magdalene.
Monsignor Keith Barltrop, director of the office, said: “What we wanted to do was to use this wonderful feast day to give fans of the novel the chance to discover who St. Mary Magdalene really was and her role in the Catholic Church.”
Clare Ward, of the Catholic Agency to Support Evangelization, said that the claims made about the saint in Brown’s novel “have been the source of heated discussion which many argue are fiction and a distortion of the facts.”
“In a positive sense, what the book does reveal, however, is a widespread thirst for the truth,” Ward said. “It’s at this level that the initiative of the Catholic Enquiry Office can be of service to the novel’s enthusiasts.”
