Editor's Note: The movie "Angels and Demons" is considered a financial flop in the United States. It must be noted 70% of revenue generated by Hollywood films derives from foreign viewership. See: http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/ -- JMZ
Commentary by Arlene Sawicki *
Disparaging the Catholic Church is the real purpose of the latest Dan Brown/Ron "Opie" Howard movie “Angels and Demons.” Bill Donohue, President of the anti-defamation Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights www.catholicleague.org is demanding a disclaimer as the team who produced "The DaVinci Code" uses the same confusing mix of "fact and fiction" to spin a suspenseful conspiracy tale revolving around a secret [long thought moribund society], the Illuminati.
The League has published a booklet, "Angels and Demons: More Demonic Than Angelic" to debunk the mythology, lies and smears of Dan Brown's book made into a movie which was released on May 15th in U.S. theaters. Donohue states, "As with "The DaVinci Code," the real problem lay in Brown's deceit. He takes real life characters, like Copernicus and Galileo; and real life organizations, like the Illuminati; and real life issues, like science and religion, and blows them to smithereens."
Author, Dan Brown, a master of disinformation, deliberately misrepresents CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research http://cern.ch) and its use of antimatter as a destructive energy source, which representatives from CERN say “would take billions of years to create."
Brown’s myth that the secret brotherhood of the Illuminati were ruthlessly hunted and brutally massacred by the Catholic Church because of its “anti-science” bent, is libel and easy to disprove. In truth, the Illuminati was founded by a German law professor Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and collapsed on its own in 1787. It was populated by men of the Enlightenment, cut off from their family and friends to build a cult-like, revolutionary society, who believed they possessed some special knowledge that would enable them to reform Germany. Galileo died in 1642, so to associate him with this secret society is downright dishonest and suspect. Myths about Galileo are so imbedded that Brown never bothers to check out the historical record, he would rather condemn the Church as intellectually wretched and detestable and advance every negative stereotype proposed by its detractors.
Following is a list of events that the Illuminati are still credited by some conspiracy theorists with doing: The assassination of Presidents Lincoln, Harrison, Taylor, Garfield and McKinley. Princess Diane's death was also their doing. The French and Russian Revolutions, the writing of the Communist Manifesto. The founding of the Federal Reserve, Workman's Compensation, adoption of the Federation Income Tax, the League of Nations, the Communist Party, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Bank. It played a role in WW I and WW II, the Cold War, 9/11, AIDS, Ebola and the Gulf War Syndrome and was even responsible for Hurricane Katrina.
Brown's book is filled with historical distortions aimed at Christianity, including the fact that most of its doctrines and symbols have ancient pagan origins, predating the Church by thousands of years; including, the crucifixion as a divine means for salvation.
If the Catholic Church was so “anti-science” why did Pope Benedict XIV grant an imprimatur to the first edition of the complete works of Galileo? Pope Urban VII was a friend and patron of Italian artist Bernini, not an adversary, as the movie depicts.
“For the last fifty years,” says professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “virtually all historians of science…have concluded that the Scientific Revolution was indebted to the Catholic Church." Sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the reason why science arose in Europe, and nowhere else, is because of Catholicism.
If ignorance is bliss, it must be comforting to Dan Brown and his anti-religion fans to believe that “Science is God.” You will have to pour that snake-oil over your popcorn to really enjoy “Angels and Demons.”
* Arlene Sawicki is a veteran Catholic pro-life/pro-family activist who resides in South Barrington, Illinois.
For the following report:
go to: http://www.mindszenty.org/report/2009/MAY09.pdf
Still another anti-Catholic film presented by the "tag team of distortion", producer Ron Howard and author Dan Brown, is dissected. The film's melding of fact and fiction, the historical and scientific inaccuracies, the curious warnings about the Church's involvement in conspiracies and secret societies, all suggest "Stay away from this movie!"
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