05/25/09
It seems to me that the Debunk-Dan-Brown Machine wasn't cranked up for Angels and Demons as much as it was for The DaVinci Code. This may be because Catholic culture watchers realize that there are bigger things to worry about than a book and a movie that will go away in three months, things such as the numerous federal judges who are going to be appointed to life terms by Obama in the next few years.
Perhaps it's also because Ron Howard's movie is a bit less anti-Catholic than expected. There are even Catholic "good guys" who come into view at the end of an S curve in the plot, including one who says to the agnostic protagonist, Robert Langdon, "My church feeds the hungry! My church comforts the sick and dying! What does your church do?" The credits roll with the sense that Dodge is big enough for both faith and science and that the two can even get along.
But like The DaVinci Code, Angels and Demons doesn't let historical facts get in the way of the story. It does reinforce the axiom that the Catholic Church is against science and reason, a belief most cherished among hedonists and morons who post screed in the comment boxes following news stories about Catholics. There would be no science without the Church's development of the ideas that the universe is separate from God, created by him to be knowable and predictable, that He, as Wisdom 11:21 says, ordered all things "by measure number and weight."
Of course the story waves the bloody shirt of Galileo, who was punished for proclaiming as true something that neither he nor other astronomers, given the knowledge of the time, could rightfully say was more than a theory. Galileo's punishment was house arrest (not torture, branding or murder), a sentence I daresay, that is lighter than what someone in a few years will get for slapping a transvestite.
In Brown's history, the church murdered scientists in the late Seventeenth Century. Hmm. Le'ts see: around that time Fr. Nicholas Steno published a study of fossils, an early act in the invention of Geology, opening the door to the idea that the earth is very old.
I had to laugh at the scenes shot in the Vatican's "Secret Archives." It looked like Ron Howard borrowed a set from Get Smart and there's no way The Vatican could afford library shelving like that. Archivum Secretum is a title which in English obscures the fact that "secret" has more to do with secretary and secretariat, administration, than it does with concealing things. The archives has been accessible to serious scholars for over a century and is no more "secret" than The Mencken Room at The Enoch Pratt or The Flannery O'Connor Collection at Georgia State College.
The flout that really jagged me was the accusation that Pius IX (Oh, those Piuses!) had the genitalia of ancient statues replaced with fig leaves. This was certainly done by, I believe, The British Museum but if Pio Nono really went around chiselling the doodads off statues, why didn't he paint over the ones in The Sistine Chapel?
In re action and entertainment value: See this movie if you feel a need to get out of the house and away from small screens.
Copyright 2009 by Neal J. Conway