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The Catholic Church has been criticised in fiction, such as literature, film and television. Polemics have also been written on the Church and its practices. ==Literature== Anti-Catholic stereotypes are a long-standing feature of English literature, popular fiction, and even pornography. Gothic fiction is particularly rich in this regard. Lustful priests, cruel abbesses, immured nuns, and sadistic inquisitors appear in such works as ''The Italian'' by Ann Radcliffe, ''The Monk'' by Matthew Lewis, ''Melmoth the Wanderer'' by Charles Maturin and ''The Pit and the Pendulum'' by Edgar Allan Poe.〔Patrick R O'Malley (2006) ''Catholicism, sexual deviance, and Victorian Gothic culture''. Cambridge University Press〕 Such gothic fiction may have inspired Rebecca Reed's ''Six Months in a Convent'' which describes her alleged captivity by an Ursuline order near Boston in 1832. Reed's claims inspired an angry mob to burn down the convent, and her narrative, released three years later as the rioters were tried, famously sold 200,000 copies in one month. Reed's book was soon followed by another bestselling fraudulent exposé, ''Awful Disclosures of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery'', (1836) in which Maria Monk claimed that the convent served as a harem for Catholic priests, and that any resulting children were murdered after baptism. Col. William Stone, a New York city newspaper editor, along with a team of Protestant investigators, inquired into Monk's claims, inspecting the convent in the process. Col. Stone's investigation concluded there was no evidence that Maria Monk "had ever been within the walls of the cloister". Reed's book became a best-seller, and Monk or her handlers hoped to cash in on the evident market for anti-Catholic horror fiction. The tale of Maria Monk was, in fact, clearly modeled on the Gothic novels popular in the early 19th century. This literary genre had already been used for anti-Catholic sentiments in works such as Matthew Lewis' ''The Monk''. Maria Monk's story exhibits the genre-defining elements of a young and innocent woman trapped in a remote, old, and gloomily picturesque estate; she learns the dark secrets of the place; after harrowing adventures she escapes.〔Franchot, Jenny (1994). "Two Escaped Nuns: Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk", Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley, California (USA): The University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07818-7〕 The anti-Catholic Gothic tradition continued with Charlotte Brontë's semi-autobiographical novel ''Villette'' (1853). Bronte explores the culture clash between the heroine's English Protestantism and the Catholicism of the environment at her school in 'Villette' (aka Brussels) before magisterially pronouncing "God is not with Rome." In a chapter of Fyodor Dostoevsky's ''The Brothers Karamazov'' called ''The Grand Inquisitor'', the Catholic Church convicts a returned-from-Heaven Jesus Christ of heresy and is portrayed as a servant of Satan. Dan Brown's best-selling novel ''The Da Vinci Code'' depicts the Catholic Church as determined to hide the truth about Mary Magdalene. An article in an April 2004 issue of ''National Catholic Register'' maintains that "The Da Vinci Code claims that Catholicism is a big, bloody, woman-hating lie created out of pagan cloth by the manipulative Emperor of Rome".〔()〕 An earlier book by Brown, ''Angels and Demons'', depicts the Church as involved in an elemental battle with the Illuminati. A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester quotes several anti-Catholic stereotypes about Middle Ages, while pretending to be academic.〔()〕 In Germany, Otto von Corvin has published two anti-Catholic books. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Anti-Catholicism in literature and media」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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