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But few may be aware of a challenge on another front: a growing genre of books that takes church history and gives it a fictional twist under the auspices of entertainment and enlightenment.

The crop of books set to be released this year -- some reportedly researched and concocted even before Dan Brown’s bestseller hit bookstores -- are written by American, Spanish and British authors; all are being translated into dozens of languages and are set for large first runs with high profile publishers.

Most focus on the supposed deep, dark secrets of the church, such as crusades against rival sects, the lost treasure of the knights templar, and what really happened at the Last Supper. The National Catholic Register interviewed three authors of these religious thrillers to find out whether their books may further malign the church.

Javier Sierra, an author from Malaga, Spain, promises to “reveal the unknown secrets” behind Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper” in his novel The Secret Supper.

“Of course, my book is a fictional work, but based upon real documents, bibliographical sources and characters of 15th-century Italy,” Sierra told the National Catholic Register. “My idea is to offer a possible explanation to the anomalies included by Leonardo in his painting. And if I use a novel, and not a historical essay, it is because Leonardo did not explain ‘The Last Supper’ in any of his notes.”

Those “anomalies,” according to Sierra, include the fact that neither Jesus nor his apostles have halos, that Jesus is not consecrating the Eucharist, that there is no meat on the table (there should be a Passover lamb), and that there is no chalice. They correspond with the beliefs of the Cathars, members of a heretical religious sect that lived in southern France and northern Italy in the Middle Ages and were dualists -- believing that a good god of spirit was continually at war with an evil god of matter.

Sierra surmises that Da Vinci incorporated Cathar elements into the painting because “it was a challenge to paint a Cathar scene in the very heart of a Dominican priory and the Milanese headquarters of the Inquisition,” he said.

But Bruce Boucher, the Art Institute of Chicago’s director of European Decorative Arts, Sculpture and Ancient Art, said that Sierra’s claims were highly unlikely.

“I don’t think that the Dominicans -- who were considered models of orthodoxy – would allow Leonardo to introduce schismatic beliefs into ‘The Last Supper,’ commissioned for their refectory. Patrons had their own ideas of what should be in a painting,” Boucher said.

“There was a Florentine tradition of painting scenes of the Last Supper for convents and priories that stressed the sharing of a meal between Christ and his disciples -- it was an imitation of Christ and his disciples when the Dominicans came together for meals.”

The Labyrinth

Author Kate Mosse splits her time between homes in West Sussex, England, and Carcassonne, France, and has set her novel Labyrinth in Languedoc in southwest France during two different time periods: the early 13th century and present day.

The plot revolves around three parchments bound into books, said to contain an ancient secret dating from 2,000 years before the Christian era in ancient Egypt; the books are lost during the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars and rediscovered some 800 years later.

“In Labyrinth, I was not writing about the church or deliberately seeking a religious theme, more that it was the place and the history of the region that inspired what is an adventure thriller,” Mosse said.

“The history of the Catholic crusade against the Cathars is well documented and not under dispute. At the heart of Labyrinth is a respect for faith and what it means, although there is certainly a criticism of intolerance and the inability of any organized religion to allow others to follow their own morality and faith.”

However, medieval historian Thomas Madden, chairman of the history department at St. Louis University, cautions against misconceptions about the history of the church and the Cathars.

“Catharism flourished because the secular lords either ignored the heresy or actively promoted it,” Madden said. “In the 13th century, Pope Innocent III called a crusade against those lords.

“It is simply untrue that this crusade was a ‘genocide’ or that it was even a way to destroy the cult. Instead, it was a means to replace those lords who refused to see to the spiritual health of their people,” he said.

Madden stressed that after the crusade there were still plenty of Cathars.

“The heresy vanished, though, under the subsequent efforts of the Inquisition. The vast majority of Cathars, instructed by the inquisitors, were restored to the Catholic faith.”

The ...