Hey folks, did you hear? The Da Vinci movie was a huge flop at the Cannes Film Festival this week. Not that I take pleasure in the misfortune of the movie’s producers and actors, but when it comes to religious bigots and high profile slashers of reputations I have, shall we say, somewhat less sympathy.

Perhaps there is a bit of poetic justice here. Not only did Dan Brown go to great lengths in his book to trash the good name of Leonardo da Vinci by calling him a flaming homosexual and insinuating that he was some secret underworld Satanist, but the ultimate insult to the consummate Renaissance Man was writing a piece of artistic trash about him. Salman Rushdie has said that The Da Vinci Code is “a book so bad it makes bad books look good” Wow! Mark Shea said on his blog: “If you are going to risk your eternal soul, it should at least be over something noble and romantic and big…But to lose your soul over this cartoonish, illiterate, dishonest piece of hack drivel?" Yea and verily!

If Leonardo were alive today, do you think he would be a sycophant of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code? Not likely.

Now, by all accounts, Sony Pictures has made a piece of celluloid trash capitalizing on Leonardo’s priceless legacy, and we have it on the highest authority (Cannes) that it’s a bomb. Think of this: our generation will forever have to envision the sublime Mona Lisa with invisible ink graffiti written all over her face screaming, “How dark the con of man.” How dark the con of unsuspecting moviegoers is more like it. Anyone who actually goes to see this wretched excuse for cinema will be coolly conned out of about ten bucks and get a well-merited two-and-a-half hour nap at the movie theatre.

Not only that, but we’re going to forever have to be pulling noxious weeds out of our kids minds on some basic matters of the faith. One friend wrote me about her 7th grade CCD class that was discussing St. Mary Magdalene as the first to witness the Resurrection of Jesus, and a boy blurted out rather innocently, “Hey, isn’t she the one who married Jesus?”

Ted Baehr of MovieGuide has pointed out that Sony is so nervous about this risky Da Vinci venture that they issued it with little time for a backlash. “Big movie studios dump movies worldwide without previews because they are afraid that the word-of-mouth will kill them. They are trying to get as much money as quickly as possible before the public finds out they have a stinker.” And stinker it is. Even if you detach from all the scurrilous and blasphemous nonsense that is contained in the movie about Christianity and Catholicism, you still have to deal with the fact that this movie is just the prostitution of a real bad book about a great Renaissance Man.

And Leonardo will have none of it.

Nor should we! Join the boycott of the Da Vinci movie and keep the lies and defamations from spreading.