As Tom Hanks and Ron Howard gear up for the May release of The Da Vinci Code sequel, Angels & Demons, it looks as if the Vatican is going to get exercised all over again.A few weeks ago, the holy city's official newspaper Avvenire fired a shot across the film's bows when it stated that it "cannot approve" of the latest feature, inspired by the works of Dan Brown.
And when Howard and co were shooting in Rome last year, the Church banned them from filming not only in the Vatican, but also within the grounds of any church in the city. They had to move to Naples instead.
"Normally we read the script," a spokesman for the diocese explained helpfully, "but this time it was not necessary -- the name Dan Brown was enough."
All of this has raised suspicions that the Church will call on the faithful to boycott Angels & Demons, just as it did with The Da Vinci Code.
The campaign against that film was spearheaded by Cardinal Tarsisio Bertone, who was then Archbishop of Genoa but is now Pope Benedict's right-hand man. So it seems likely than a reaction of some kind before the film's May 15 worldwide release is on the cards.
The Church's distaste for the works of Mr Brown is understandable; in The Da Vinci Code Mr Brown hypothesised in his inimitable prose style that Mary Magdalene and Jesus had fathered a child, creating an extant bloodline.
And in Angels & Demons cardinals get their eyes poked out, a madman tries to blow up the Vatican and the Pope has a child using artificial insemination (which raises all sorts of awkward questions).
What is less understandable is why they (uniquely) take his books so seriously, or what they imagine can possibly be gained from speaking out against them.
Cardinal Bertone called the film version of The Da Vinci Code "a potpourri of lies, a phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions", (a bit rich for a man in the transubstantiation business, but never mind) and urged the faithful to avoid it like the plague.
But one feels he might have been better off maintaining a lofty silence. A fellow Archbishop, Velasio De Paolis, has warned against the possible "boomerang effect" of such statements, which might persuade more people to go along to find out what all the fuss is about. After all, The Da Vinci Code took in a cool $760m worldwide, despite the fact that it was a truly dreadful film.
It's interesting as well that while a film as silly as Angels & Demons will provoke the Holy See to furies, other, often infinitely more subversive films seem to go almost unnoticed.
In the comic documentary Religulous, which went on limited release here yesterday, American comedian Bill Maher repeatedly mocks the virgin birth, the resurrection and the whole notion of Christ's divinity, yet there hasn't been so much as a peep from the Vatican about it (though they did ban him from filming there).
It's probably a question of scale: a few million souls around the world may eventually get to see Mr Maher's not particularly sophisticated anti-religious diatribe, whereas hundreds of millions will be attracted by Angels & Demons.
The Church might be better advised to remove itself from the proscribing business altogether, because through their long history of attempting to muzzle international cinema they've tended to come off looking the silliest.
In his fine book Sin and Censorship, Frank Walsh details the one true faith's war against cinema's irresistible urge towards lewdness, crudeness and outright blasphemy, which seems to have begun with a health and safety film during World War One.
As young Americans prepared to board ship for the trenches of Europe in 1917, the US government wisely decided to warn their boys about the kinds of nasty things they might pick up from over-familiar locals. So they made a series of short films on the perils of VD and how it might be avoided.
But the Catholic Church was not at all happy about this, their argument presumably being the same one they invoke against condom use today -- that the best thing for those boys would be to look away from that happy hooker and abstain from entering the alluring French cathouse. And they succeeded in blocking the distribution of the government's VD films, no doubt causing much GI misery in the process.
Hollywood itself, though, was a tougher nut to crack. While hierarchy and local priests could control the cinema-going public and even the censor in staunchly Catholic countries like Ireland, Spain and Italy, in Jewish-dominated Hollywood things were a bit less straightforward.
Through the permissive days of the 1920s Christian censorship groups struggled to be heard against a tide of louche comedies and dramas that traded in sexual innuendoes and references to infidelity, homosexuality, abortion, drug use and even featured women in their underwear.
With the advent of sound, however, the Church gained a foothold in tinseltown thanks to a zealous Jesuit called Daniel A Lord. Lord had worked as a consultant on Cecil B DeMille's biblical epic, King of Kings, but the arrival of talkies greatly alarmed him. "Silent smut had been bad," he would write in his autobiography, but "vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance".
In 1929, he began working on the first American Motion Picture Production Code, which was adopted in 1930 and greatly curtailed what were perceived as the excesses of the studios.
Lord's work formed the basis of the Hays Code, and his moral campaigning was carried on by the terrifyingly named Legion of Decency, which for several decades had exercised the power to shut films down that didn't meet their exacting standards.
Among their moral victories were forcing ex-burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee to change her screen name; altering a suggestive dance sequence in what I would have thought was the morally unimpeachable musical Oklahoma; investigating Frank Sinatra's dubious fitness to play a priest in Miracle of the Bells; and removing the essential marital infidelity from the plot of Two-Faced Woman.
But by the 1950s, the Legion of Decency had become an absurd anachronism, and the Church was forced to adopt a more selective approach to the proscription of films. These days, only a heretical no-no like Angels & Demons will provoke them into comment.
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(Source: II)