Vatican official suggests boycott of "The Da Vinci Code"

I don't like organized boycotts of movies and music, because of the chill it might cast on artistic expression, but Archbishop Angelo Amato does make a good point about "The Da Vinci Code," which will be released later this month.

Catholic News Service reports:

If the kind of "slander, offenses and errors" contained in Dan Brown's best-selling book and the film based on it had been written about "the Quran or the Shoah (the Holocaust), they rightly would have provoked a worldwide uprising," the archbishop told Catholic communications directors.

Amato, who stopped short of calling for Catholics to boycott the film, is secretary of the church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A previous head of the congregation was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.