What's a Catholic to think about the book version of 'Angels & Demons'?

"Angels & Demons,"

by Dan Brown

Okay, it's taken me some time to get to "The DaVinci Code" pre-quel, but I figured I'd better read the book as well as see the movie if I want to have any credibility in talking or writing about the controversy that has some in the Catholic community feeling anxiety at the least and threatened at the most.

So, here on the day before the movie is released in the United States, let me say this about the book version of "Angels & Demons": Potboiler.

Nothing special in the way of literature, writing or even a good mystery.

Clever use of the geography of Rome? Yep.

A compelling story? Nope.

A page-turner? Not really.

If you haven't figured out half-way through the 700-plus pages where this puppy is going to end up, you need to read more paperback mysteries. If I tell you that the hero -- the same guy who is the super sleuth in "The DaVinci Code" -- gets the girl in the end, will you really be surprised?

The Catholic concern

So why do some in the Catholic community have their undies in a bunch about the movie "Angels & Demons?"

It's not so much that the church is attacked by the plot. The action of some of the clergy and hierarchy might be something some would say clergy and hierarchy would never do, but nowadays with some of the news our priests and bishops make, that argument is specious at best.

What author Dan Brown does is continue an insidious train of thought about the Catholic Church that tends to drive Catholics crazy. It's the matter-of-fact way of writing that makes statements about religion and about the church that have an anti-religion and anti-Catholic bias.

Some examples:

• The theme behind the plot is that science is getting revenge on religion "after centuries of persecution" by the church. References to Galileo and Copernicus are one part of the evidence for that, but conveniently missing are references to the likes of Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian priest who is rightly called "the father of modern genetics," or Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, "the father of modern chemistry," a Catholic beheaded during the French Revolution.


• There's a tangential passage that takes hero Robert Langdon back recalling a Harvard University classroom scene in which he cleverly points to Catholic rituals as being unoriginal and borrowed from other cultures. Take the Eucharist: How the "god-eating" rite of the Aztecs were supposedly "borrowed" by Christianity seems to be quite a stretch, given that a man such as the evangelist Paul, writing in the 1st century, and the writers of the synoptic Gospels for that matter -- pegged between 60 and 115 AD, aren't likely to have even known of the existence of the Aztecs, the first reference to which appears in the 6th century.


• One of the minor characters sees the church as "an innocuous entity...a place for fellowship and introspection...sometimes just a place to sing out loud without people staring at her."

And then, of course, there is that hauling out of the tired demonization of the Catholic Church for its "wealth." Looking down a hallway at the Vatican, one character "was sickened by the opulence," author Brown writes. "The gold leaf in the ceiling alone probably could have funded a year's worth of cancer research."

Is it jealousy that makes others point at the church and say it should give away all the timeless works of art therein to end poverty? Maybe the Louvre should do the same? And while we're at it, let's sell the U.S. Supreme Court Building to the highest bidder and put the court in the rented space of a closed auto dealership. Who needs artistry, craftsmanship and beauty? -- bz

Capture of Holocaust mastermind a must-read story

"Hunting Eichmann,"
by Neal Bascomb

The story finally is told how Holocaust survivors and Israel's spies found the mastermind of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution," the hideously well-organized plan that murdered six million Jews during World War II.


The subject of the quest, Adolf Eichmann, was the diabolical brain behind the extermination plan. It wasn't until 15 years after the war ended that he was finally found and, after a lengthy trial that was front-page news around the world, hanged for his genocidal crimes.


It's a helluva story, nonfiction that reads like a modern mystery with twists and turns, dead ends, near misses and tiny details that yield huge payoffs.


How Israel's Mossad -- helped by tips from survivors of the Nazi death camps -- tracked Adolf Eichmann to Argentina and a miserable shack with no electricity or running water is nothing short of a miracle.


How Eichmann escaped Germany as World War II came to a crashing end around him could be seen as miraculous as well. How this wanted war criminal made his way to South America, however, includes a segment that will cause shame for members of the Catholic community.



Catholic collusion


Part of the network that helped Nazis escape, Bascomb's research uncovered, included Bishop Alois Hudal, "an Austrian and a devotee of Hitler who proudly brandished his golden Nazi Party membership badge."


Bishop Hudal personally wrote to Argentine dictator Juan Peron to request visa for 5,000 Germans and Austrians.


A string of monasteries and convents in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy served as refuge to hide and smuggle Nazis away from prosecution, and Eichmann took advantage, finally making his way across Europe to Genoa, Italy, and the Church of San Antonio. Franciscan Father Edoardo Domoter, a Hungarian sympathetic to fleeing Nazi's, sheltered him in the rectory there while Eichmann secured a refugee's passport from Red Cross officials and a visa from the Argentine consulate, and soon was on the passenger ship Giovanna C headed to South America with a number of other former Nazi bigwigs.


Bascomb notes that, while cardinals and priests were involved in helping war criminals escape prosecution, "Pope Pius XII did not officially approve of the Vatican's involvement in the network, but he certainly turned a blind eye to it, primarily because of the church's commitment to act as a bulwark against the spread of communism."



Amazingly detailed research


The capture of Eichmann and especially the deception required to hide him and then spirit him out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel are as close to against-all-odds material as any fiction writer might dream up.


The fact that the Israelis were able to pull it off -- find him, first of all, grab him off the street, secret him away for a number of days and whisk him off to Israel in the first El Al plane ever to visit Argentina -- is terrific storytelling.


Pulling all the pieces of the story together through interviews and historical documents is truly the work of a gifted writer and team of researchers. The 327-page Houghton Mifflin Harcourt book includes an additional 27 pages of verifying footnotes and helpful bibliography and index. Photos taken with hidden suitcase cameras, maps of Eichmann's Argentine neighborhood and even Eichmann's Red Cross passport -- using the alias Riccardo Klement -- bring life and authenticity to the pages.

The world cannot forget

What Bascomb adds, though, as icing on the cake, is the reason that bringing Eichmann to trial on Israeli soil was so important for the Jewish people, especially for the younger generations of Israelis but even more importantly for the world. Bascomb writes in his epilogue:

"As for the rest of the world, the Eichmann affair rooted the Holocaust in the collective cultural consciousness. . . . The Holocaust was finally anchored in the world's consciousness -- never to be forgotten -- by the outpouring of survivor memoirs, scholarly works, plays, novels, documentaries, paintings, museum exhibits, and films that followed in the wake of the trial and that still continues today. This consciousness, in Israel and throughout the world, is the enduring legacy of the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann."

This is history every human should know. -- bz

Pinch-hitting for your dad, Catholic writer shares what your father wanted you to know about living

"A Guy's Guide to the Good Life: Virtues for Men,"

by Robert P. Lockwood

You could read "A Guy's Guide to the Good Life" just for the volume and variety of quotations worth remembering, but Bob Lockwood's sometimes hilarious, always thought-provoking guys tour through prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice, faith, hope and charity digs so much deeper than that.

Lockwood's brief, 140-page Servant Books paperback might accurately be described as something your father would have written if your father had written down all the things he wanted to you to know and remember.

It's a genuine service Lockwood performs, given that many fathers aren't/weren't the gifted writer this long-time columnist for Catholic publications is, and given that so many men tell anecdotally about how little their father ever verbally communicated -- with them or anyone else.

Lockwood pinch hits for dad, passing on soothing-yet-challenging drops of wisdom through stories, most with a Catholic angle, many with a sports angle, often accompanied by a cold beer.

And Lockwood is anything if not a truly gifted storyteller.

A Catholic writer who quotes Meatloaf?

Along the way he quotes men whose words are worth recalling, mixing Charles Dickens, St. Paul, John Lennon, Benedict XVI, Dante (perhaps more than one might care) and John Paul II, among the names you'd recognize. Pop music plays in the background, with lyrics by the Beatles, Skeeter Davis, and Meatloaf helping make his point. Lockwood even manages to channel Cat Stevens.

It all works, though, to base his -- well, it's teaching, when you come right down to it -- in a real world, a world in which Lockwood has lived some 60 years and thinks what he's learned in that time is worth sharing for our benefit.

If there's a goal, it is to make guys ask that crucial question: "What the hell am I doing with my life?"

Lockwood is a creative phrase maker who has penned quotes of his own worth pondering, including a definition of his topic that seems to stick: "The virtues are how we are meant to live. They are what we admire in others and hope to find in ourselves."

Throughout he pesters guys with the thought we can be more -- that a virtuous life isn't too difficult to achieve.

Have an appetizer

Here are just a few tasters of Lockwood on the seven virtues:

"Prudence means living in the truth, not as a self-righteous jerk but as a guy who wants to look at himself in the mirror every morning without fearing that he's sold out."

"Fortitude borders on obstinacy, a willingness to hold steadfast to our principles when life is telling us not to bother."

"Sometimes our priorities can get a little out of whack. There's where temperance comes in."

"Justice doesn't always come searching for us in the way we like."

"Faith is a pilgrimage, never an endpoint."

"Hope is not mere wishing but the serene and full confidence that God will never abandon us."

"We think of charity as giving out a little spare change."

Now for full disclosure: I've known Bob Lockwood for better than 30 years now, watched him fight the personal and professional battles guys fight, and consider the wisdom he shares as valuable -- and as fun to read and as thought provoking -- as listening to his gravelly voice tell a story, with a cold beer, of course, and with a ball game on the tube. -- bz