Angels and Demons

by Pa Rock
Movie Critic

This wasn't a great weekend for really devout Catholics. President Obama gave a kick-ass commencement address at the University of Notre Dame to numerous standing ovations - and Angels and Demons opened in theatres across the nation. The President didn't hide from the issue of abortion, but addressed it head-on in his speech, while three dozen pitiful protesters were arrested outside of the venue. Dan Brown, the author of Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, sees the Catholic Church as being two millennia of shadowy conspiracies. All in all, it was probably a good weekend for most Catholics to hit the beach!

I first read Angels and Demons several years ago, just a few months prior to the death of Pope John Paul II, and well before the election of his successor, the decrepit and intellectually dishonest Benedict XVI. That is significant, because this story centers around the election of a new Pope. Dan Brown, in the novel, goes into intricate detail about how the new Pontiff is chosen, and that portion translates well to the screen.

Angels and Demons was written before The Da Vinci Code, and it is the better of the two books. I read them in the order that they were written, not a must, but there are references to things in the latter that occurred in the former. Ron Howard, the director, brought them to the screen in reverse order, due undoubtedly to the fact that The Da Vinci Code sold like gangbusters and had the whole world talking. (According to Amazon.com, it is the number one selling adult hardback of all time.) People were so taken with Brown's book and his clever take on history, that they then went back and "discovered" Angels and Demons.

Both tales paint the Church in a bad light, undoubtedly the reason that the Vatican refused to provide any assistance to this current movie. The villains in The Da Vinci Code were members of Opus Dei, a secret order within the Church that Brown implied has enormous influence over the Church's operation. Brown put forth a tale of how the pregnant wife of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, was smuggled out of the Holy Land and to the safety of France, and that descendants of Christ were possibly still alive. The Knight's Templar became aware of this unknown royal line during the Crusades and hustled to protect the secret and the descendants. The Church rounded up the Knights Templar and murdered them for their wealth, but, according to Brown's version, a few survived. His Opus Dei, of course, was hellbent on finding these threats to the Church and snuffing them out.

The villains in the other tale, Angels and Demons, were the Illuminati, a secret order that were driven underground a couple of hundred years ago by the Catholic Church because they were too open to the notions of science. In this story, the Illuminati have returned and managed to infiltrate the Vatican where they are killing off the Cardinals most likely to become Pope and threatening to level Vatican City and much of Rome with a small vial of "anti-matter."

The hero of both stories is Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon, who was adequately portrayed by Tom Hanks. He had a quest in each movie that was accompanied by breath-taking action, pulsating music, and the obligatory pretty girl. Both movies are well worth the seven or eight dollars that it costs to see them, if for no other reason than the tours of Rome and (in The Da Vinci Code) London. But, sadly, neither movie captures the full magic of Dan Brown's work.

There is a scene toward the end of Angels and Demons (the book) where an evil priest, who happens to have a parachute, bails out of a helicopter a mile or so above Vatican City, leaving Robert Langdon and the chopper pilot to deal with the anti-matter bomb that is aboard the helicopter. In the book Langdon jumps from the helicopter, sans parachute, and uses his jacket like a parachute to guide his fall into the Tiber River. Apparently there were no stunt men in the stable willing to tackle that one, and the movie kept Professor Langdon safely on the ground.

Another thing that I found disappointing was that Langdon was flown to Rome in the book via a new experimental aircraft, one that I suspect exists, but Ron Howard left that alone and flew him to Rome in a Vatican jet.

I like Ron Howard, and have since he was running the streets of Mayberry, but I kept wondering what Steven Spielberg would have done with this material. Howard translated the basic stories to film, and he did so in a way that will sell tickets and popcorn, but he definitely did not push any boundaries or break any new ground.

And as for the Vatican's continuing displeasure with Ron Howard and Dan Brown - suck it up, boys. Brown's follow-up to these two fine tales, The Lost Symbol, another Robert Langdon thriller, will be in bookstores on September 15th - and the movie won't be far behind. (Maybe this one will explore the Nazi influence over the Church - that would certainly be timely!)

Archbishop Raymond Burke Is Not Worthy of the Name Catholic

by Pa Rock
Hypocrisy Hound

There are two institutions that never let me down on a slow news day. If I feel the need to rant, I have to look no further than to the Republican Party or the Catholic Church. Indeed, as often as not, those two groups verge on being indistinguishable.

The Catholic Church has been in the news a couple of times this week, and, as usual, its leaders have been going out of their way to embarrass themselves.

Last Friday Archbishop Raymond Burke, the head of the Vatican's Supreme Court and the former Archbishop of St. Louis, took the University of Notre Dame to task for inviting the President of the United States to speak at its spring commencement. Burke said that the invitation was "scandalous," and he went on to accuse President Obama of pushing an anti-life and anti-family agenda.

This isn't the first time that this clown (Burke) has stuffed both feet in his mouth. In 2004 he stated that he would not give communion to presidential candidate (and Catholic) John Kerry due to Kerry's support of abortion as a public policy. In 2007 he made a similar threat to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani for the same reason. He also ran his pious mouth after the confirmation of Catholic Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services because she, too, supports the choice of abortion in public policy. He said the Sebelius confirmation was "the source of deepest embarrassment for Catholics."

Archbishop Raymond Burke said that if Catholics are not willing to stand up for the church's teachings, "we are not worthy of the name Catholic."

You know what, Ray? It's a shame you were born in the twentieth century and had to miss the Catholic glory days of the Spanish Inquisition! You're a real sweetheart - spewing all of that venom at exceptional public servants! Where was your outrage over the pedophile priests? Obama isn't one one-hundredth as scandalous as your pervert priests who took sexual advantage of little boys and girls! (And don't think for a minute that the sexual abuse has stopped. Child molesters never change!) Sebelius is not half the embarrassment that you are? You are shameless for not turning your wrath on your robed brothers who were routinely destroying the lives of little children.

But Burke is not the only prominent Catholic to be out of sync with his Church and the world in general.

Today Pope Benedict XVI was in the Holy Land visiting Israel and the Palestinians, and he managed to offend most of his hosts. The Pope went to the site of a holocaust museum in Jerusalem but didn't go inside. The problem: he is promoting Pope Pius XII for sainthood. Pius was the Pope during World War II and a Nazi appeaser who turned a blind eye to the holocaust. If the Pope had ventured into the museum he would have encountered a plaque pointing out the treachery of Pius XII.

Pope Benedict is a sad religious leader who is too damned old to be running a used car lot, much less a worldwide religion . He, too, would have been much happier burning heretics in the Spanish Inquisition. Oh, for the good old days - back when people really got religion - or suffered the consequences!

The New Genocide?

by Pa Rock
Heretic

It's been a while, too long in fact, since I blasphemed Pope Benedict XVI. The last time I went on a tirade about the sins of the Church of Rome in general and His Holiness in particular, I was skewered by a reader who felt that I might have been a tad on the negative side. And I was - and I will be again with what follows. But as a fallen Catholic who has been greatly disappointed with the inflexibility and dangerous positions of the Church, I feel that I have a right, if not a duty, to express some dissent.

I will admit to having slipped in my level of faith over the years, but it was Bernard Cardinal Law, a man whom I met on a couple of occasions when he was the lowly Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri, who finally succeeded in driving me from the Church. Cardinal Law had a vision - a vision of himself as the first American Pope. In trying to protect the image of his turf, he spent years in the Archdiocese of Boston shuffling pedophile priests around every time one of them came to his attention. By not removing these sick individuals from the active priesthood and arranging for some serious treatment for their pedophilia, Cardinal Law sentenced thousands of innocent children to suffer needless and cruel abuse that has scarred them for life - just to protect his good image.

Cardinal Law's incompetence and/or complicit criminal behavior short-circuited his run for Pope. That, of course, was a plus for Catholicism. But Law's removal from contention had a negative impact as well - it left the field open to the evil Cardinal Ratzinger who was ultimately elected by the College of Cardinals as Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger, a German reprobate and former member of the Hitler Youth Corps, was Pope Paul's doctrinal enforcer, a man who had a personal mission to bring back the good old days of Catholicism as it was practiced in the fourteenth century.

Benedict hadn't been Pope too long when he stirred up the entire Muslim world with comments indicating that Islam was a religion built on violence. Way to incite, Man of Peace! Then, more recently, he stirred up the world's Jewish population by bringing an excommunicated Priest back into the comfort of the Church - a priest who believed and preached that the Holocaust was a fiction.

Those two acts were thunderously stupid, but chances are no one died from the addle-brained pronouncements of this old man teetering on senility. Last week, however, the Pope uttered remarks that could easily turn very deadly. While on a tour of AIDS-ravaged Africa, His Eminence pontificated against the use of condoms. Really! The Pope said that using condoms was not the answer, and then he prattled on about the virtues of abstinence.

Yes, sir, Your Popeship, abstinence is the answer - for you. (And it would be nice if you could get your "celibate" priests to practice abstinence also.) But human beings have human needs. Don't tell people living in poverty to give up the one small pleasure that they have in life - because they aren't going to listen to you any more seriously than American Catholics do. Telling people in Africa not to use condoms is tantamount to genocide. It's time to get real and use your big-assed church for health education and the prevention of disease. That, old man, is what Jesus would have done.

Branson Bound!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Jorge Medina is a retired Roman Catholic Cardinal from Chile whose chief claim to fame until recently was that he made the official announcement of the election of Pope Benedict XVI to the world. But being retired doesn't mean that Jorge has to stop making news.

Madonna (the singer, not the mother of Jesus) is making her first concert tour of Chile, and, being Madonna, she is salaciously stirring controversy as she struts her stuff in front of whooping and hooting South American audiences. "This woman," the Cardinal is reported to have said, "comes here and in an incredibly shameless manner, she provokes a crazy enthusiasm, and enthusiasm of lust, lustful thoughts, and impure thoughts." (Sounds to me like a man who has at least one hand in his pants pocket!)

Just for the record, Cardinal Medina made those comments during his homily at a Mass in honor of Chile's late military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who caused the deaths of over three thousand dissidents during his seventeen-year reign of terror. (Hey Jorge, what was the penance for that little atrocity?)

Also for the record, the crowds at Madonna's two Chilean concerts were huge, with some people waiting in line for up to three days for tickets.

Madonna is a now fifty-years-old, and while she still apparently has the ability to stir lustful thoughts, at least among Catholic ancients and Alex Rodriguez, I suspect that the days of her world tours are numbered. And although I've never seen her perform in person, sooner or later I will probably catch her act - in Branson!