Angels & Demons a historical flop

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This article was published 17/05/2009 (6333 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Faster than you can buy overpriced popcorn, religious leaders are voicing their discontent with Angels & Demons, the sequel to Dan Brown’s 2006 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. This time, Brown isn’t claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and created a holy bloodline.

In Brown’s story, the secret society known as the Illuminati has vowed to foil the election of a new pope as revenge for the church’s persecution of scientists, including Galileo. His Robert Langdon character — an international symbology expert played by Tom Hanks — is brought in by the Vatican to intervene.

The film revisits the God-versus-science debate and has angered some in the religious community.

"The only thing accurate is the buildings," said Lynn Mitchell, director of religious studies at the University of Houston, who viewed the movie recently. "Dan Brown intellectualizes pure fantasy."

Brown, as he did with The Da Vinci Code, has readily told reporters the story is fiction with some factual information.

Religious scholars beg to differ.

Brown’s claims that modern science developed to replace medieval theology and the Bible are "historical nonsense," Mitchell said.

For example, the book and film suggest that church officials killed Polish astronomer Copernicus because they disagreed with his theory that the sun is the centre of the universe.

But the debate wasn’t between the scientific community and the church, Mitchell maintained. Rather, the conflict was internal, as Catholic scholars proved and disproved each other’s theories. In fact, Mitchell notes, some of the pioneers of modern science, including Copernicus and Galileo, were Catholic.

"There wasn’t a flying saucer of agnostics and atheists that came down and discovered science," Mitchell said. "It was the Roman Catholic scholars."

Fr. Robert Spitzer, a Jesuit priest and president of Gonzaga University who has written extensively on astrophysics and religion, said that even the church-versus-science debate outside the movie is rife with inaccuracy.

Much of the resistance to Galileo came from the secular world, he added. And Galileo’s books could not have been published without church support.

"People build up myths about the chasm between science and religion; everyone has a drum to beat," Spitzer said. "But the actual history is far more complex."

Pre-release, the Catholic League threatened to boycott the film, and the Italian Catholic Church reportedly refused to let the movie be filmed in Rome’s churches. After a May 7 screening in Rome, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano praised Howard’s directorial prowess, saying the "reconstruction of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica were magnificent." And then, without skipping a beat, the review said the film is "two hours of harmless entertainment that has little to do with the genius and mystery of Christianity, without getting beyond the usual stereotypes."

The conservative Christian Film and Television Commission issued an extreme-caution alert, charging that the film’s "ultimate impression is that the Catholic Church is mostly a bunch of bumbling fools with a few really bad guys included in the bunch."

Speaking of bad guys, what about the Illuminati, a powerful secret society that brands and murders three cardinals and threatens to bomb Vatican City?

According to most experts, the Illuminati were created in Bavaria, which is now Germany, in 1776. But contrary to legend and Google search results it was hardly a group to create a New World Order. Some historians say the group lasted only nine years.

In fact, many of its members’ ideas, as with others in the Enlightenment, says Mark Fenster, author of Conspiracy Theories, Secrecy and Power in American Culture, were what we now recognize as classical liberalism. Such ideas are beliefs in the separation of church and state and that people should have autonomy apart from religion or a powerful monarchy.

Ultimately, for some movie-goers, Brown’s film won’t be a manifesto on science and God, it’ll just be a story.

"If this causes your faith to be challenged, you need to re-evaluate yourself," Heather Simpson, a Houston Catholic who watched the film. "It’s a movie."

— Houston Chronicle

 

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