Cult classic

In Dan Brown’s new thriller, Origin, we are introduced to the Catholic church’s sinister far-right rival — a paranoid worldwide cult dedicated to undermining the reforms of Pope Francis.

This toxic outfit has its own pope, who runs it from his ‘Vatican’ at El Palmar de Troya, on the Andalusian plain; hence its name, the Palmarian Catholic church. Brown describes a ‘soaring Gothic cathedral’ dominated by ‘eight towering spires, each with a triple-tiered bell tower’. Inside, members are required to attend interminable masses and pray to hundreds of freshly created saints, including St Adolf Hitler.

Origin is a clumsily fashioned thriller, even by Brown’s standards, and you might imagine that he invented the Palmarian church. But it’s real. Not only does it have a pope — Peter III, the fourth pontiff since the church separated from Rome in 1978 — but the cathedral at El Palmar de Troya is much as he describes it.