You can’t call yourself a Catholic until you’ve heard enough about The Da Vinci Code already.

God’s post

The release this week of the film of The Da Vinci Code has raised a number of unexpected concerns in the small community of Inner Springs. Fr Thong, the parish priest, has used five consecutive sermons over the Easter Season to say that he won’t be mentioning The Da Vinci Code, that he has nothing to say about The Da Vinci Code, that The Da Vinci Code is not worth his notice, that he has better things to worry about than The Da Vinci Code and that, as a matter of fact, he can hardly recall the name of The Da Vinci Code. 

Our postie is a man of letters.  Gabriel Hermes, also the most diligent gossip in town, is an avid fan of Dan Brown’s book. Gabriel offers more devoted service than the usual postman. He was horrified when he was told that the postie in Beaconsfield had failed to deliver the mail to the two trapped Tasmanian miners for the entire fortnight they were underground. In that time, they had missed out on the Mother’s Day catalogues from K Mart, Target and Big W. Gabriel just hoped that the stores in Beaconsfield would extend any special offers that the miners may have missed on account of this negligence.

Gabriel is a post-modern postman.  The address on an envelope may or may not have a bearing on its ultimate destination. Nevertheless, residents of Inner Springs appreciate the fact that when the mail arrives it has been already opened and read. This saves the bother of having to fight your way into the envelopes which arrive every month from the bank and the phone company bringing bad news. It’s more pleasant to have a real person such as Gabriel to break the tidings to you.

‘By golly,’ says Gabriel with a smile. ‘Your mortgage payments have gone up this month.’

Gabriel can make the worst economic news seem sweet. He should be delivering the federal budget, not just the mail. He is also good at economic forecasting.

‘If this continues,’ he says cheerfully, ‘I’ll be delivering your mail to the caravan park.’

My neighbour, Cardinal Shallots, became a little sensitive about Gabriel reading his mail, especially at the time when letters about his redundancy package were arriving from the Vatican.

‘Doesn’t the Vatican have a superannuation fund?’ asked Hermes on one of his calls to the Cistern Chapel.‘

It does,’ replied the Cardinal. ‘It’s called Heaven. But it only offers a return in proportion to investment.’

‘I’ve heard about those,’ said Hermes. ‘They’re hell.’

Shallots also has had bother with Gabriel opening his mail and redirecting it to where he thought it was meant to go. When an encyclical letter arrived from the Pope addressed to ‘all persons of good will’, Hermes was glad that he’s spotted the mistake and dropped it off to the Goodwill family where nobody could figure out what in tarnation it was supposed to be or why anybody was writing to them about condoms. Similarly, other encyclicals ended up in the hands of the Bishops and the Faithfulls, none of whom had much interest in reading about condoms either.   

‘I think it’s from the Readers Digest,’ said Mr Goodwill. ‘That’s why its got our name on it. But it makes no sense to me why there ain’t no coupons or vouchers or lucky numbers or free samples inside.’

Nobody ever had the heart to tell good Pope John XIII that, when he decided to write to the whole world, Readers Digest had been doing it for years. Cardinal Shallots was working at the Vatican Post Office at the time and was thankful so few people took the opportunity to write back. Nothing upset his peace as much as when the Pope started writing about peace.

Cardinal Shallots once thought he could get the better of Gabriel Hermes by mailing himself the letters of St Paul, knowing that Gabriel would read them on the way. Hopefully, the postman’s soul would benefit from this. But seeing mail addressed to the Corinthians and the Philippians, Hermes dropped them into the local Chinese restaurant because it has been run for generations by the only Greek family in town, homesick people with a penchant for putting olives on their sizzling Mongolian lamb loin chops.

The letter to the Hebrews went to the pub, where the publican took 20 seconds to decide he had no idea who wrote it. Doctoral students can take years to reach the same conclusion. The letter to the Galatians was also a problem. Hermes read the line about there being neither male nor female and decided it was meant to be for the local vet who’d been running a campaign about the importance of desexing. When he found that the letter to the Colossians said ‘wives, give way to your husbands’, he delivered it to the local traffic officer. He assumed the letters to the Romans was meant for the Roman Catholics, but none of the Catholics seemed to know anything about it. By this stage, the cardinal was ready to give up.

‘If St Paul were alive today,’ I suggested to Shallots, ’he’d just send an email with an attachment’.

‘The problem,’ replied the thoughtful Cardinal, ‘would be that people would be too afraid to open the attachment. Letters from St Paul have been known to radically alter the soft ware on even the most carefully protected hard drive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The so called St Paul virus will search for any reference to the Law, delete it and replace it with the story of Jesus.’

The only thing known to have distracted Gabriel Hermes from the task of reading the mail was when he stumbled across The Da Vinci Code. He propped it up on the front of his motorbike and let the residents open their own mail until he was finished.

Hermes reached the obvious conclusion.

‘This book is about a sheila who discovers that she is the great, great, great, many times great, granddaughter of Jesus,’ he mused. ‘It just makes you wonder who else is descended from whom.’

Indeed, in Inner Springs the discovery that Jesus had unacknowledged children would pale into insignificance beside the discovery that the local mayor, Howard Winston, had some illegitimate offspring. Or that he himself was descended from Elizabeth I, one of the few virgins in history rumoured to have died of syphilis. The difference between Jesus and Winston is that Jesus was divine but told everyone to keep it quiet. Winston, on the other hand, is not divine but wastes no spread the word that he is.

Gabriel Hermes wrote to Dan Brown, asking him to come to Inner Springs and sort out the skeletons in the closet over here. The letter was returned to sender. Hermes knew at once that this was part of a diabolical conspiracy to disguise the truth.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Shallots has been harder to impress. He spent years among the priceless books and manuscripts of the Vatican library. Only once did he ever unearth a mystery. He once discovered part of an envelope inside an ancient scroll. It was on the day his forced redundancy was announced. He went to the Vatican café to caffeineate his sorrows, and ordered a coffee scroll. All the pastries served at the coffee shop were ancient; the one he was served dated from the 15th century. He looked at the envelope. The post mark was still visible. It had been sent from far away Inner Springs. Perhaps this was a sign to guide his future…