Movie's aim is to hurt Catholic Church

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 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 society, the Illuminati.

Author, Dan Brown, a master of disinformation, deliberately misrepresents CERN and its use of antimatter as a destructive energy source. 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.

The Illuminati was founded by a German law professor Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and collapsed on its own in 1787. Galileo died in 1642, so to associate him with this secret society is downright dishonest and suspect. Myths about Galileo are so embedded 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.

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-Catholic 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

South Barrington