The phenomenal success of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code has spawned a whole industry around the subject. The release of the recent film has taken the book’s controversial message to an even wider audience and, despite critics having panned the film, box office takings remains buoyant.

Brown fictionalised the idea that many heretical historians and researchers have put about; that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had children, making the Holy Grail not a cup but a womb - a vessel for the holy blood.

While the Church may be spitting nails over it, the public’s imagination has been captured by what is essentially a great yarn, filled with murder, conspiracy and code-breaking.

The more unkind commentators have said that Dan Brown should really be sued for crimes against literature rather than against the Church but, for all its lowbrow clichés, the book is a page-turner.

Anyone who regularly walks past Westminster Cathedral in London will note that visitor numbers do seem to be up. However, film-goers won’t really be walking through the same archways as Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou as Westminster did not give permission for filming there. Instead the film was shot in Lincoln Cathedral 135 miles away to the North. Props and scenery were used to mimic Westminster cathedral.

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