Guess we know whose top 10 movie list won't be including The Da Vinci Code this year.
The Vatican has stepped up its denouncement of the hotly anticipated movie, upgrading its disapproval of the book's supposedly anti-Christian theories from pulpit-spewing rants to full-blown boycott.
Which means Ron Howard apparently missed his window of opportunity to hit up Mel Gibson for advice on how to direct a religious-themed movie without ticking off an entire religion.
As it is, Monsignor Angelo Amato, the number two official in the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office, has urged Catholics everywhere to boycott the upcoming Tom Hanks film on the basis that it patently "offended" the Christian faith.
Amato called Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "stridently anti-Christian...full of calumnies, offences and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the Church.
"I hope that you all will boycott the film," he said, according to the ANSA news agency.
Amato dispensed the protest plan while addressing a Catholic conference at Rome's Santa Croce University. He went on to say that Church followers should be more willing "to reject lies and gratuitous defamation," and credited the book's enormous success--it has sold more than 40 million copies since its 2003 release--with "the extreme cultural poverty on the part of a good number of the Christian faithful."
The book has drawn the ire of church officials practically since publication, with the main point of contention revolving around two of the book's central assertions--the bloodline theory and Opus Dei.
The book purports that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that the duo begat a line of French royalty, a theory viciously opposed by the Church's teachings, and that the conservative sect Opus Dei went to great lengths (lying, killing, all manner of sins, really) to cover it up.
In his proposal to boycott the would-be blockbuster film, Amato expressed bafflement as to why church followers failed to be outraged about the book in the way that, say, Muslims were about the recent Mohammed cartoons. He claimed a similar book about that religion would have sparked a "global rebellion."
"If such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust they would have justly provoked a world uprising," he said. "Instead, if they are directed against the Church and Christians, they remain unpunished."
The proposed boycott is just the latest, albeit most strident, offensive the Vatican has issued against the book and upcoming film.
Earlier this week, the Italian Interior Ministry agreed to remove a giant movie poster promoting the film from the outside of a Rome church after several clergyman voiced outrage at its presence.
Last week, Opus Dei petitioned Sony, the film's distributor, to add a disclaimer to the movie, which the sect says portrays the group as a secretive cabal of murderous monks and generally bad people.
But a sermon given on Good Friday, for which Pope Benedict XVI was present, laid the best groundwork for the proposed boycott, as a Vatican priest denounced the book and film as "pseudo-historic" works aimed at undermining the Church's authority.
Church-endorsed or not, the would-be blockbuster premieres at the Cannes Film Festival May 17 and goes into wide release May 19.