"Silas" (real name is Simon) is the antagonist in The Da Vinci Code, although he isn't evil in his nature. He met a Spanish bishop named Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat. Instead of murdering his father for killing his mother, Silas stabs his father on the shoulder for attacking her. Silas is the secondary antagonist in the controversial 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, and the 2006 live action film adaptation of the same name. He instructs Silas to get the keystone, kidnap Teabing, and leave by the limousine. In the film, he played an Opus Dei monk named Silas. Little does Silas know that Teabing is actually the Teacher.
The Da Vinci Code (2006) - Paul Bettany as Silas - IMDb The Da Vinci Code (2006) However, his father was furious at having an albinofor his son, and blamed Silas's mother, repeatedly be… His father often times called him a ghost as an insult. The novel depicts him as a monk, although Opus Dei has no monks. She estimates roughly 10,000 people use and visit the center each year.Before the story's main narrative, Aringarosa puts him in contact with an enigmatic figure called The Teacher and tells him that the mission he will be given is of utmost importance in saving the true Word of God. "No dungeon, no torture chamber, no albino monks running around, no, this is it," Carron says of the office.Ī longtime member herself, Carron is a wife, mother and a fashion consultant by profession.
headquarters in New York City is nothing like it's presented in "The Da Vinci Code." Terri Carron, unofficial spokeswoman for Opus Dei, loves to show that the group's U.S. An estimated 300,000 people attended his canonization in 2002 and yet Opus Dei finds itself constantly on the defensive. Pope John Paul II fast-tracked Escriva to sainthood. Three successive popes have supported Opus Dei. "What I concluded is that for the most part both sides are describing the same events, but seen from very different perspectives," Allen explains. In time and time and time again I also heard from literally thousands of current and satisfied ex-members. "For the book, I did more than 300 hours of interviews with current members, ex-members, and so on and I heard those stories of mind control, of invasion of privacy of excessive pressure to join and to stay. John Allen was granted unprecedented access to the organization. It's all that other stuff Dan Brown mentions. "You don't have your mind anymore, like the group has taken your mind, your ability to critically think about something and make a judgment," says Tammy di Nicola. The whips and chains get all the attention, but not even the most embittered ex-members say that's the source of their beef with Opus Dei. They're directed to wear a barbed chain, like this one, called a cilice, around their upper thigh for two hours a day, but they're by no means the only ones.
The fact is, Opus Dei numeraries are supposed to use a whip, called the discipline, once a week for as long as it takes to say the Lord's prayer. He says all descriptions of secret rituals in this novel are accurate. "The floor was covered with blood," he recalled.ĭan Brown states his book that Opus Dei is controversial due to reports of brainwashing, coercion and a dangerous practice known as corporal mortification. His closest aide described being present when Escriva flailed himself with a knotted, cordlike whip more than a thousand times. In "The Way," the spiritual guidebook his followers live by, Escriva wrote, "Never think badly of anyone" but he also wrote "Blessed be pain." In "The Da Vinci Code," Silas is a numerary. The rest, called numeraries, live celibate lives in separate men's and women's Opus Dei residences, but tend to work outside. Seventy percent are lay Catholics, called supernumeraries, who live at home with their spouses and children. There are priests in Opus Dei, but they're only 2 percent of the total membership. He taught that through any kind of honest work in the everyday world, ordinary people, striving for a kind of spiritual perfectionism, can find holiness. "There's the Opus Dei of myth which is the Opus Dei of Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code.' Then there's the Opus Dei of reality which is a relatively small group of about 85,000 Catholics worldwide, who are committed to what their founder, a Spanish saint by the name of Jose Maria Escriva called the sanctification of work," Allen explains.Įscriva founded Opus Dei - Latin for the "work of God" - in 1928 in Spain. He's written what is widely considered the definitive book on Opus Dei.