HOLLYWOOD — When Ron Howard’s film Angels & Demons opens in U.S. theaters on May 15, will viewers be treated to anti-Catholic tripe or murder mystery?

If it’s anything like the Dan Brown novel from which it’s adapted, it’s an open attack on the Catholic Church.

The response to the film version of Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was much more vociferous. But Angels & Demons has had no shortage of critics. Foremost among them has been the Catholic League.

“The Da Vinci Code was trying to plant a dagger into the heart of Christianity by questioning the divinity of Jesus,” said Catholic League president William Donohue. “The danger with this film is that viewers will entertain the stereotype that the Catholic Church is against reason and science.”

Based on information provided by a Canadian priest who spent two days with the Angels & Demons crew during filming in Rome last summer, Father Bernard O’Connor, Donohue has described the film as anti-Catholic.

“A person self-described as a ‘production official’ told the Canadian priest that Dan Brown spoke for the majority of those working on the movie when he said, ‘Like most of us, he [Brown] often says that he would do anything to demolish that detestable institution, the Catholic Church.’ Father O’Connor also said that Brown credited the media for the ‘demise’ of the Church.”

Responding to the criticism, director Ron Howard wrote, “Neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic,” saying that the film “treats the Church with respect — even a degree of reverence — for its traditions and beliefs.”

But promoting the myth that the Church is opposed to science isn’t the only example critics cite of the book’s anti-Catholic agenda.

In the 2006 film The Da Vinci Code, Brown created a murderous Opus Dei “monk” as his villain. This time, it’s an evil cardinal who is elected pope.

The villain, Catholic author Carl Olson noted, is the most fervently orthodox Catholic character, the papal chamberlain, Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca.

“The greatest enemy of the Catholic Church, the novel indicates, is not a mysterious group such as the Illuminati, but devout and loyal Catholic leaders,” said Olson, “the obvious implication being that orthodox, traditional Catholics tend to be unstable, narrow-minded and even violent.”

“The author doesn’t understand or care very much how a conclave is really conducted,” said Gregory Tobin, senior adviser for communications at Seton Hall University and author of a chapter in the book Inside Angels & Demons. “My biggest concern is that viewers will come away with a very skewed idea of how the Church governs itself. Fortunately, the last papal election was within memory for most viewers, so I think that an inaccurate portrayal will have much less effect than if we hadn’t had a papal conclave in a very long time.”

Science’s Incubator, Not Persecutor

Whereas The Da Vinci Code was an attack on Christianity, Olson said that this story is a more pointed attack on the Church.

“Angels & Demons goes after the Catholic Church in the modern day and presents it as being overwhelmingly, in its very doctrines and dogmas, opposed to reason and science and modernity,” said Olson. “What is insinuated in the novel in many ways is that the only way for the Church to come to grips is to overcome its outmoded practices, beliefs, doctrines and dogmas.”

Michael Foley, associate professor of patristics at Baylor University and author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything, said that the myth about religion and science is an old one, and one that is far from the truth.

“G.K. Chesterton had it right: The Church is not trying to bring us back into the Dark Ages; the Church was the only thing that brought us out of them,” said Foley. “Rather than be the enemy of knowledge, the Catholic Church has more often than not been its incubator. Its priests and monks have either pioneered new departments of knowledge or made substantial contributions to them, from the 17th-century creation of stratigraphy by beatified Bishop Nicolaus Steno to the 20th-century Big Bang Theory by Father Georges Lemaitre.”

Furthermore, said Foley, the perpetuation of such myths has precedent. “The Church’s enemies have often invented fantastic versions of history in order to justify their irrational hatred of Catholicism,” he said. “The well-known story of Columbus debunking belief in a flat Earth, for example, is pure myth, disseminated in 19th-century American history books in order to portray the Catholic Spanish court as enemies of scientific progress.”

“The truth is: Both Columbus and the Spanish court knew the Earth was round, but they disagreed on it size, Columbus thinking that the Earth’s circumference was small enough for him to sail west and reach China in just a few weeks,” added Foley.

In Brown’s novel, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon says that “outspoken scientists like Copernicus … [were] murdered by the Church for revealing scientific truths. Religion has always persecuted science.”

“This is not just false; it is libelous,” said Olson. “Nicolaus Copernicus was a canon at the cathedral in Krakow … who died after a stroke at the age of 70.”

“Unfortunately, Brown is reinforcing a stereotype,” stated Owen Gingerich, senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in an interview with the editors of Secrets of Angels & Demons. “Copernicus was a servant of the Catholic Church. He dedicated his book to the pope and never suffered any personal reproach or persecution. In truth, it is extremely difficult to document anyone put to death as a heretic for introducing scientific ideas.”

Church’s Response

When director Ron Howard sought to film scenes inside Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria churches, the Diocese of Rome did not grant permission.

The movie is described as a work of “fantasy that damages common religious sentiment,” said Father Marco Fibbi, the press officer for the Diocese of Rome, explaining why permission wasn’t granted.

Instead, Howard reportedly had production staff, posed as tourists, shoot pictures and lightning-fast film takes inside the Vatican and used the material to digitally recreate several papal buildings.

Whereas several Church-affiliated groups called for boycotts of The Da Vinci Code, this time around, the approach seems to be to ignore the film.

Opus Dei, which came under attack in the previous book and film, launched an educational effort that actually seemed to benefit the personal prelature. This time around, it isn’t taking a leading role.

But the Catholic League has not kept quiet. It produced a booklet “Angels & Demons: More Demonic Than Angelic,” which explores the book’s myths about the Church. The Catholic League has distributed more than 13,000 of the booklets so far.

Donohue isn’t alone. Catholic author Steve Kellmeyer has written a booklet titled “Debunking Angels & Demons.”

“Angels & Demons is just another exercise in Catholic-bashing,” said Kellmeyer. “It’s not as compelling as The Da Vinci Code, because the argument he’s bringing forward most people don’t care about.”

“The book tries to set up a war between religion and science,” said Kellmeyer. “He misrepresents the Galileo affair, the Church’s position on evolutionary theory, genetic research and the CERN atom smasher, and accuses the Church of holding positions that it does not hold.”

“The science in the book is so bad that CERN created a web page refuting statements Brown had made about the physics lab and antimatter,” said Kellmeyer, who noted the irony. “When the Church tried to debunk Brown’s claims in The Da Vinci Code, she was attacked for addressing a work of fiction. Now, a bunch of physicists are attempting to debunk a work of fiction.”

Catholic and non-Catholic groups had asked people to boycott The Da Vinci Code. Many wonder if the boycott and controversy didn’t just encourage more people to see the film, which grossed more than $750 million.

Lead actor Tom Hanks admitted the role that controversy plays in building buzz for a film.

“The marketing department of any studio would love to create controversy over their films, but they can’t do it on their own,” Hanks told Reuters. “They need a shared partner.”

“We’re not boycotting the movie,” said Donohue. “We’re just saying, ‘Go ahead and entertain yourself, but don’t believe the nefarious ideas they’re trying to plant about the Catholic Church, reason and science.’”

Tim Drake writes from

St. Joseph, Minnesota.