A writer and professor of theology from the University of Scranton, Eric Plumer, is looking at the Dan Brown phenomenon, and thinks there is a reason the best-selling author strikes a chord with Catholic readers:

Women cannot be official leaders or teachers in the Catholic Church — roles reserved for ordained men. Not only are women barred from being ordained as priests or bishops, but the question of their ordination is not even to be discussed, as Pope John Paul II stated in 1994. And in case there were any lingering doubts, Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) added that this teaching is infallible.

To say that huge numbers of American Catholics were stunned would be an understatement.

It is precisely this reaction that Dan Brown has been able to exploit. Most Catholics had been taught that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute and were shocked to learn in “The Da Vinci Code” that the Bible says no such thing. They began to wonder whether there was some truth to the novel’s claim that calling her a prostitute was part of the Church’s systematic effort to discredit her and women in general.

What the reaction to “The Da Vinci Code” (and “Angels and Demons”) reflects is one of the burning issues of the American culture wars: Where is moral authority to be found?

The Vatican claims that its teachings come from Christ through the apostles and bishops. Yet Catholics have been quick to note that among those teachings is the sacredness of individual conscience, in which God also speaks and which must therefore be obeyed.

John Paul II warned, however, that even if your conscience tells you something is permissible (the use of contraceptives, for example), your conscience may be wrong and you may be doing what is objectively evil.

A huge percentage of American Catholics find themselves in disagreement with the Church’s condemnation of contraception as objectively evil–as wrong always and everywhere.
They complain that they find no such teaching in the Bible and that it contradicts their own lived experience of marriage.

The gradual erosion of the Church’s moral authority turned into a landslide in 2002 when the American media were full of reports on sexual abuse by clergy and the bishops who had covered it up.

At the same time societal changes are proceeding at a dizzying speed. For example, the completion of the Human Genome Project has inaugurated a ” biorenaissance.” These things have all led Catholics to seek a spirituality more in tune with the times.

And here again Dan Brown has tapped into a feeling that there must be more to Jesus’ message than what has been presented to them, especially if Jesus was, as the Church itself proclaims, the most vibrant and charismatic individual who ever lived.

Dan Brown was able to use all of this ferment to his advantage.

There’s more, but you get the drift.

Well, I’d take issue with some things here, beginning with the notion that women “can’t be official leaders or teachers” in the Church; women have been members of the Roman Curia for decades (and with executive powers, at that), and a case could be made that the most influential lay Catholic leader in the world is a woman: Rita Rizzo, better known as Mother Angelica.

But read it for yourself and see what you think.