Painted out of the picture: part of the best-selling appeal of The Da Vinci Code is a conspiracy that has kept women from taking their rightful place in the church.

THE GOOD NEWS FOR CATHOLICS THIS SUMMER was that the runaway bestseller about church officials embroiled in a conspiracy of silence was a work of fiction. After being pummeled for more than a year with headlines about bishops and cardinals covering up sexual abuse of minors by clerics, it seemed like a vacation to curl up with a wicked tale about a Vatican conspiracy to protect early Christianity's biggest sexual secrets and realize it was only a novel.

Dan Brown's brainy thriller, The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday), which since March has been sitting atop the New York Times bestseller list, has something to please every taste. It's a murder mystery with enough clues and puzzles to keep Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot's little grey cells spinning. It's an international man (and woman) hunt that makes Tommy Lee Jones' pursuit of The Fugitive look like bumblings of the Keystone Cops. It's a high-speed chase for the Holy Grail that laps Indiana Jones and his pop three times before they're even out of the gate. And it's a battle royal between secret societies over stakes that dwarf The Lord of the Rings. What's more, this potboiler with more cliffhangers than a six-pack of Saturday afternoon serials is just plain fun to read.

Brown's tale gets off to a flying start when an albino-monk-henchman-assassin (working for Opus Dei, no less) breaks into the Louvre one starry night and mortally wounds the museum's chief curator, Jacques Saunier. Managing to escape his killer's grasp, however, Saunier uses the last few moments of his life to transform his own naked corpse into a body of evidence richly inscribed with clues and codes that will help the novel's protagonists uncover and defeat his enemies.

Before you can say "Mona Lisa" or "The Last Supper" Harvard art historian and religious symbol expert Robert Langdon (think Indiana Jones with a better tailor) and police inspector and cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Saunier's brilliant and fetching granddaughter) are on the scene and the scent of a murder mystery that will lead them across Europe and into some of Christianity's oldest and best kept secrets. But they are also being hunted by Saunier's assassin and a small army of French police pursuing them as murder suspects.

Together the intrepid investigators use their talents to move through a maze of artistic, linguistic, and mathematical codes and puzzles, unraveling the mystery of Saunier's murder and uncovering the greater mystery of his identity as the head of an ancient secret society entrusted with a secret about Christianity's founder and origins. This is a secret, Langdon and Neveu learn, that Christianity has kept from the faithful for nearly 2,000 years, a secret that church officials have tried to extinguish time and time again, and that members of Saunier's society (including Da Vinci, whose art is chock-full of clues about this secret) have protected and passed on to successive generations. It is the secret of the Holy Grail.

And so the murder investigation and manhunt become a quest to uncover the mystery of the Grail, and our protagonists soon discover that they are not looking for a golden cup but for a person whose story and identity have been buried far beneath the surface of Christianity's official teachings, a person whose importance to Christ and early Christianity is suppressed and distorted by tradition and only hinted at obliquely in Christian art and legend.

Without giving away the whole game, let's just say that anyone with feminist sensibilities would be amused to learn who this novel says the Holy Grail was and what this person's connection to Jesus and the early church may have been. Such a reader would also see why a patriarchal hierarchy committed to a celibate male clergy might be willing to move heaven and earth to keep this person's identity and marital status a secret. (OK, I gave some of it away.) To be fair, some of these notions have been suggested before, and some scholars have previously argued that the person in question has gotten a raw deal from official Christian tradition.

WHY HAS A MURDER mystery about a Vatican conspiracy to cover up early Christianity's biggest sexual secret become this year's runaway blockbuster? In large part because Brown has crafted a great thriller with the sort of smart, resourceful hero who could easily go Hollywood (imagine Jack Ryan with a doctorate in art history). With the breakneck pacing, serpentine plotting and conspiratorial tone of the best of Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, The Da Vinci Code has all the stuff for a major blockbuster.

But Brown's erudite thriller also has a Harry Potterish appeal. The author may describe his art historian hero as "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed," but like young Master Potter, Robert Langdon launches readers into the arcane world of religious symbols, mathematical puzzles, and linguistic codes that are as challenging as a fast game of quiddich.

And like Potter, Langdon's adventure draws us into a magical and parallel universe of secret societies, mystical rituals, and ancient texts with indecipherable codes protecting mysteries long kept secret from ordinary folks. While appealing to a slightly older audience, Brown's thriller lets readers slip through the same looking glass as Lewis Carroll and J. K. Rowling. A Da Vinci painting is no longer a landscape or a portrait, but a portal to a strange and secret world.

STILL, A GREAT DEAL OF THE NOVEL'S appeal is its feminist sensibility, particularly its translation of feminist critiques of Christianity and Catholicism into popular fiction. The book suggests--as some feminist scholars have been arguing for a while--that the original Jesus movement was much more welcoming to women, marriage, and sexuality than the church Constantine and Augustine handed on to us.

Jesus embraced women as friends, colleagues, and disciples, and the earliest Christian community accepted women as apostles, priests, and the heads of local churches. Indeed, one of those women (Brown suggests) was Jesus' preeminent disciple and the first apostle. Sadly, however, the early church soon lost its feminist nerve, and a patriarchal spirit and theology supplanted and suppressed an appreciation of the divine feminine, leaving only a small secret sect to protect and pass on the secret of the Holy Grail.

Unfortunately--as in any novel--it's tough to know where fact ends and fiction begins, and few serious scholars would make or support the sweeping sort of claims found here. Still, many feminist academics have argued that official Catholic teaching misreads the history of the early church and has passed on a "man-itized" tradition that has stripped away the voices, perspectives, and stories of women who were disciples, apostles, and colleagues of Christ--and silenced the feminine dimension of God herself.

Biblical scholar Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's modern classic In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (Crossroad) reread the standard reports of early Christianity with a feminist eye, and found the overlooked and forgotten women who co-founded Christianity.

Elizabeth Johnson's equally groundbreaking She Who Is (Crossroad) recovered feminine language and symbols to speak of God and gave the whole Christian community ways to speak of and to the God in whose image we are made, male and female. And Karen Jo Torjesen's When Women Were Priests (HarperSanFrancisco) uncovers evidence of women's leadership in the early church and the scandal of their subordination in the rise of Christianity.

In the end Brown's novel is a vastly entertaining read that mixes the thrill of a high-speed chase with the magical pleasures of a quest through an enchanted forest of art, literature, and history. And that is reason enough to recommend any book as a beach or bedstand companion. But, in its own popularizing way, it also gives voice to a growing feminist critique of a patriarchal church and secrets it keeps about the goodness and godliness of women. And that's good news, too. USC 

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.