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"Copernicus was surely one of the greatest lights of his time, but was he not censured and excommunicated for his admirable scientific discoveries?" So wrote nineteenth-century anti-Catholic polemicist Charles Chiniquy in his influential 1886 diatribe Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.

He wasn't—but it's a typical misconception. Nor did Pascal or even Galileo suffer the sanctions Chiniquy describes. (Galileo, whose almost unique case is certainly a black mark in church history, was not subjected to flogging and dungeon imprisonment—only house arrest.)

Cumulatively, such historical misconceptions and distortions form patterns out of almost nothing, creating an anti-Catholic canard pitting the Church against scientific inquiry and scholarship. "That's insidious. That's one of the great black legends about the Catholic Church," said Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in a phone interview. "You wouldn't even have the universities today if it weren't for the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages."

A scene from 'Angels & Demons'

This urban legend gets an upgrade in Dan Brown's book, Angels & Demons, the predecessor to The Da Vinci Code. "Outspoken scientists like Copernicus" were not just excommunicated, but "murdered by the church for revealing scientific truths," according to the book.

The claim is even more strongly put in the film version of Angels & Demons, reworked as a sequel rather than a prequel to the 2006 Da Vinci Code and opening in theaters this week. "The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever," declares Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), referring to Copernicus, Galileo and the rest of their fellow conspirators in Brown's version of the Illuminati, here a secret society "dedicated to scientific truth."

For Donohue, it's another all-too-typical example of how the Catholic Church is routinely subjected to slurs and attacks in the media that other groups are spared. "You can't even put an inoffensive depiction in a cartoon form of Muhammad," he said. "They simply won't even print it."

As if confirming Donohue's point, the film version of Angels & Demons scrubs the religious and ethnic identity of an Arab Muslim assassin from Brown's book, much as the Muslim villains of Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears were recast in the film version as neo-Nazis. In the new film, the assassin is played by Danish actor Nikolaj Lie Kaas as a non-religious professional who sells his services to the highest-bidding fanatics of any religious persuasion—"Christ, Allah, Yahweh," it's all the same to him.

"The Last Acceptable Prejudice" is the provocative subtitle coincidentally shared by a pair of unrelated books released in the same month of 2003, Philip Jenkins' The New Anti-Catholicism and Mark S. Massa, S.J.'s Anti-Catholicism in America. As the name of Jenkins' book suggests, the old brand of anti-Catholicism promoted by Chiniquy has long since become a marginal phenomenon. But anti-Catholic attitudes—like the Copernicus slur—haven't gone away. They've just changed with the times.

Rome's foes today "aren't debating transubstantiation, they're debating transgender," said Catholic film critic David DiCerto. "They aren't debating the real presence [of Christ] in the Eucharist, they're debating the real presence of humanity in the womb. It's much more the hot-button moral issues than the hot-button theological issues."

Derrickson on the 'Emily Rose' set

What does "the last acceptable prejudice" mean in practical Hollywood terms? Director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Day the Earth Stood Still), a Christian, prefers the term "stereotype" to "prejudice," but doesn't mince words about the upshot: Media images of Catholics, he said, are often "unqualified portrayals of Catholics as sexually repressed killjoys, corrupt moneygrubbers, maddening hypocrites, fanatical criminals, medieval moralists, and predatory child rapists." As examples, he cited George Carlin's scandalous Cardinal Glick in Dogma, Nicole Kidman's crazed Catholic mother in The Others and John Standing's depraved Bishop Lilliman in V for Vendetta.

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