Word: vaticans
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...unusual appearance. Benedict XVI arrived in the back of the papal plane just after it took off for the return trip to Italy. Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi introduced him with a smile, calling this "the longest, most complicated and maybe most tiring" of the Pontiff's 12 foreign voyages. Benedict, his face toasty bronze from a week of public appearances under consistently sunny skies, repeated his call to seek signs of hope in an otherwise bleak Middle East landscape. Having just come from deep prayer at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional site of Jesus' death...
...next Pope, and threatened to murder them and, that very night, blow up St. Peter's Square with a vial of antimatter stolen from a Geneva research lab. In Rome by sundown, Langdon finds adversaries in a stern Cardinal (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and the head of the Vatican's Swiss Guards (Stellan Skarsgard), and two allies in a passionate young Vatican priest (Ewan McGregor) and a scientist (Ayalet Zurer) from the antimatter lab. The meat of the story occupies about five hours that evening, as Langdon rushes from one holy site to another, trying to save lives and solve...
...serial-killer thriller, not far from the Saw series in its devoutly clinical depiction of distressed bodies. (See the eyeball on the floor! Gasp as plump rats snack on a dead Cardinal's face!) For adults who are or were Catholic, the movie is a backstage story of Vatican politicking, à la Monsignor and The Godfather Part III; it paints the College of Cardinals as possibly the only ruling body older and more removed from mundane realities than the U.S. Supreme Court. For conspiracy buffs, there's the notion that the Holy Fratricide might be an inside job, which recalls...
...grandly evil plot, was written before The Da Vinci Code. So in the order of publishing, it made sense that the church would initially allow Langdon to pursue his doctrinal theories. In the order of the movies, though, it beggars belief that Langdon, having exposed a truth the Vatican has suppressed for millennia, would be asked to consult on the kidnapped-Cardinals caper. Yet apparently L'Osservatore Romano doesn't hold a grudge. After all the Da Vinci grief, it gives a thumbs-up to the new movie - or, in the unlikely event the review was written by a clergywoman...
...Then again, just because the Vatican has laid hands on Angels & Demons doesn't mean some people don't detect an unholy conspiracy. In the Christian Film and Television Commission's biweekly Movieguide, Ted Baehr wonders, "How much of the box office of Angels & Demons will end up in the Democrat campaigns? If it makes money, it could...