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Religious literature is going through a period of revival throughout the world. This can be noted also from the windows of Spanish bookshops. Books proliferate, with a vocation as bestsellers, which we could comprise in a new genre of fantasy, something like religious fiction and which, though presented with historical zeal and scientific rigour, in most cases are only a product of easy consumption, pulp fiction to be read and then thrown away, without thinking too much about it. The phenomenon, without being wholly innovative, shows some characteristics peculiar to the historical, cultural, political and religious times in which we are living. In the first place, it is clear confirmation of the fact that the religious dimension of the human being is present in the public sphere whether wished or not by certain political authorities -, because man is a religious being by nature, who has expressed, in the most disparate ways, his own transcendental yearnings in the course of the centuries. To wish to relegate the religious experience to the private sphere means ignoring reality itself. In the second place, an analysis of the type of publications that contribute to the growth of sales proves the intellectual and moral fragility of our age. Fortunately, God can be represented, reduced to fiction and even become an object of caricatures in Western culture, without all this involving disproportionate reactions on the part of believers; nonetheless, the fact that the God of the Christians and, more precisely, Jesus of Nazareth and the Catholic Church remains an object of fiction, historical recreation, or even of jokes, continues to intrigue. Undoubtedly the phenomenon will be intensified in the months ahead, with the promotion and world release of the film based on the novel The da Vinci Code. It will be a good opportunity for non-believers to demonstrate understanding and respect for the most intimate beliefs of others. It will also be a chance for believers to seize the challenge made to them, and grasp that, in an apparently adverse climate, the possibility arises to make truth shine forth and achieve a distinction between reality and fiction.
