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Coeur Sacré de Jésus/Coeur Sacré
de Marie
These stained-glass windows were installed over the front door of the Villa Bethania in the French village of Rennes-le-Château, focal point for one of the most famous conspiracy theories of the 20th century. The story goes like this: Starting in 1886 the priest at Rennes-le-Château, François Saunière (1852-1917), financed the renovation of the village’s 11th century church and construction of new buildings, including the villa. When questions were raised about how Saunière on his meager salary could have acquired sufficient wealth, a rumor started that he had unearthed ancient parchments in the church’s foundation containing evidence that 1) Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, 2) after Jesus’ crucifixion, pregnant by him, Magdalene fled to Marseille where she gave birth to a daughter named Sarah, 3) Sarah’s descendants intermarried with Frankish Merovingian royalty, and 4) their descendants continue to live in France today. Because existence of Jesus’ bloodline threatened the legitimacy of the apostolic succession of Peter, the Papacy paid Saunière a fortune to suppress these documents. This legend remained local until 1955 when Noël Corbu (1912–1968) bought Villa Bethania, turned it into a hotel, and to attract customers promoted the story in French newspapers, which came to the attention of English writers Henry Lincoln (1930–), Michael Baigent (1948– ), and Richard Leigh (1943–2007). Together they authored Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which further claimed discovery of documents revealing the Franks were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel and the existence of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, whose members, which included René d'Anjou, Leonardo da Vinci (1490–1519), Isaac Newton, and Jean Cocteau (1918–1963), were charged with protecting the Merovingian descendants of Jesus, the Knights of Templar being their military wing. In 2003 Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code, an international best-seller that emblished the story with secret codes embedded in Leonardo’s paintings and Opus Dei plots. The facts as far as they are known are these: Saunière maintained accounting books listing thousand of francs he received, against Canon law, for trafficking in masses. The parchments he supposedly found have never been produced. The Priory of Sion documents were an admitted hoax by their forger, Pierre Plantard (1920–2000). At the time of Magdalene’s purported arrival in Marseille, the Franks were a loose confederation of Indo-European Germanic tribes kept at bay north of the Rhine by Roman armies. The Merovingians enter history four hundred years later as Franks migrated south with the fall of the Roman Empire. Magdalene appears in the Gospels as witness to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. In the Gnostic Gospel of Philip she is described as “companion” to Jesus. The popularity of the “Da Vinci Code” conspiracy
can perhaps be explained by the desire to find in the unpredictable
world we live an alternate reality where everything fits neatly together
and to an impish urge to debunk the perceived arrogance of official
history. It also speaks to the vitality of Christianity, which after
two thousand years, is still seeking to understand who Jesus was and
meaning of his message.
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