Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalene?

(No pictures today as it all seems crazy and I’m blogging from a cafe so it could be their internet to fault?)

Or should that be – do I care? I picked up, what looked like being a gentle romance with some intrigue and action in it to take on holiday with me, but it turned out to be another of those “Jesus and Mary Magdalene got married and had children” books, with secret documents to be found, descendants of the pair coming together, etc, etc. It was a poor version of The DaVinci Code and Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth.

But maybe it’s where I’m coming from at the moment, doing my dissertation on anti-Catholicism, which makes me see a slightly more sinister side. These books are blatantly anti-Catholic. The descendants of the Jesus/Magdalene pairing are always the ones who know what true love really are and are persecuted for it, and always the persecutors are the Catholic Church. I know that the Catholic Church did murder the Cathars, did awful things during the Inquisition; the list can be very long. But these books always show the sinister Catholic of the present just waiting to get the book/document/code and destroy it so that “the truth never comes out.”

Is the modern Catholic Church really like this? Or is it the things in fiction that perpetuate this view so that when we see something about scandal we automatically believe it to be true because this is where our subconscious sends us?

In every organisation there will be those who are in it for their own ends, whether the Catholic Church, Anglican Church, Banking system, Parliament, Schools, etc, but do we see all of them as evil and not want to be involved with them? No in each, even with banking, we keep on working with what is there and trying to make the best of a bad bunch. As Phillip Jenkins says “Anti-Catholicsm is the last accepted prejudice”. And maybe he is right?