Varican City - The Vatican has banned the makers of Angels & Demons, the latest Dan Brown thriller to be filmed, from shooting scenes not only in the Vatican but in any church in Rome on the ground that it is "an offence against God" and "wounds common religious feelings".
Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, head of the Vatican's Prefecture for Economic Affairs, said that the author had "turned the Gospels upside down to poison the faith. It would be unacceptable to transform churches into film sets so that his blasphemous novels can be made into mendacious films in the name of business."
Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the diocese of Rome, said: "Normally we read the script, but this time it was not necessary. The name Dan Brown was enough." The Vatican fiercely condemned both the novel The Da Vinci Code and its film version, which starred Tom Hanks as the Harvard professor Robert Langdon.
Hanks also stars in Angels & Demons which, like The Da Vinci Code, is directed by Ron Howard. Published before The Da Vinci Code — which suggested that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had children — Angels & Demons revolves around a plot by a sinister elite known as The Illuminati to seize control of the papacy during a conclave to elect a new Pope.
Key scenes are set in the Vatican and two Rome churches, Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria. In both churches cardinals are murdered and mutilated with mysterious marks and symbols. Father Antonio Truda, parish priest at Santa Maria del Popolo, said that there was "no question" of allowing scenes to be shot there. "It's bad enough having to put up with tour guides explaining the scene to tourists," he said.
Vatican officials said that they had been unable to prevent the filmakers shooting exterior shots of St Peter's and the surrounding medieval streets of the Borgo, with the permission of the local borough council. However the marble halls and staircases of the former Royal Palace at Caserta near Naples are having to be used to double for Vatican interiors.
"When a film is about the saints or about stories regarding the Church's artistic values, then we give permission without any doubts," Father Fibbi told the TV listings magazine Sorrisi e Canzoni (Smiles and Songs). "But when it is a question of content which does not relate to traditional religious criteria, then our doors are closed."
The Vatican asked the faithful to boycott the film of The Da Vinci Code, which Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then Archbishop of Genoa and now, as Secretary of State, the right-hand man of Pope Benedict XVI, described as a "phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions" and "a pot-pourri of lies". The film was also contested bitterly by the arch-conservative Roman Catholic organisation Opus Dei, represented in the film by a ruthless killer monk, although it has no monks.
The plot of Angels & Demons is, if anything even more preposterous than The Da Vinci Code, and scholars have been quick to point out the book's factual errors. Thes include the claim that the oculus in the domed roof of the Pantheon is known as the "demon's hole", and the omission of "son of Lucius" from the famous inscription on the Pantheon's facade, M. AGRIPPA L. F. COS. TERTIUM FECIT (Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, Consul for the third time, built this).
Santa Maria della Vittoria is wrongly located on Piazza Barberini in the book (it is actually some way uphill, on the corner of Via XX Settembre and Largo Santa Susanna.) Equally bizarre is the climactic scene when Langdon battles the villain at Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in a deserted Piazza Navona, which in reality is lined with bars and cafes and invariably full of tourists and residents (not to mention police) day and night.
Moreover the fountain's sculptures represent not Europe but four rivers and continents: the Danube (Europe), the Nile (Africa), the Ganges (Asia) and the Plate (the Americas). The bird on top of the fountain's obelisk is not a sinister portent but a dove, the symbol of the family of Pope Innocent X , who commissioned the fountain.