I suffered through two and a half hours yesterday of this incredibly stupid piece of balderdash. Anyone who has the faintest knowledge of the New Testament, Church history or art history would not be able to take this over the top story seriously. Unfortunately, there will be many, probably who have a beef with the Catholic Church to begin with, who will embrace the film's false depiction of history and its cardboard caricature of the Catholic Church. As anti-Catholic propaganda, it is so crude and unbelievable, just like old Soviet propaganda films by Eizenstadt, or stories about the Jews' killing children. The Church has apparently been spending 2000 years killing off people to protect the "secret" that Mary Magdalene is the true God-man, not Jesus Christ. The Church has spent 2,000 years persecuting women to cover up the "sacred feminine" (odd how the veneration of Our Lady is not mentioned, particularly as that is something anti-Catholics usually use against us).
The movies has it that supposedly the canon of the Bible was imposed by Constantine at the Council of Nicaea, even though it was adopted earlier at the Council of Carthage which was approved by the Pope as the result of a process of discernment and sifting through books included in various local canons based on the criteria of apostolicity and antiquity. Contrary to the movie, Constantine did not declare Jesus the Son of God at Nicaea. Christ had been called the Son of God at least since the time of Paul, as his epistles attest. Arians would not have disputed that Christ was the Son of God, but just that He was not God but a lesser divine being. Nicaea clarified the doctrine of the Trinity as being three persons in one substance. These ideas are present in scripture, but the authoritative teaching office of the Church clarified exactly what the Scriptures meant on the nature of God. One has to understand the struggle with the Arian heresy and the clarification of doctrine at Nicaea in the context of the whole notion of apostolic teaching and the authoritative teaching office of the apostles and their successors, the bishops in union with the successor of Peter, the pope. Paul in his epistles already evinces a desire to preserve the pure apostolic teaching and warns of false teachers who will teach something different than what he preached from the beginning. This desire to preserve and clarify the orthodox apostolic faith is behind all the struggles with the early heresies.
And the idea of Sir Isaac Newton being persecuted by the evil Catholic Church despite the fact that practicing Catholicism was illegal in England of Sir Isaac's day is just one of the many preposterous falsehoods in this "fiction" that Brown claims is based on a factual basis. Going off to church this morning, I told a non-Catholic relative that I'm going off to assassination school, the ridiculous propaganda is so crude. In sum, I don't think the movie is a challenge to the faith of anyone who knows something about our faith, but it will be a danger to those who don't know anything and who will be inclined to think that this "novel" is based on a true historical background, when it is not.
Nobody's asked anyone to take it seriously. That's why its called fiction.
Congratulations! You just publicly admitted being completely out of touch with reality. It's fiction! It's amazing how many psychotics are out there, and disappointing that so many are supposedly conservative.