Until recently.

For those Americans who might not be aware, the scandal of massive pedophile child abuse by Catholic clergy - and coverups organized from the higher levels of the Church - didn't just occur in the USA, in fact, it was world-wide.

Here's a recent article on the Ryan Report in Ireland:

The Ryan Report showed that thousands of children were abused, raped, assaulted and terrorised over a period of three decades in institutions run by the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland.

I saw the film Angels and Demons and found it very entertaining. I thought the treatment of the Catholic Church was quite gentle, almost deferential in parts, as if the filmmaker was afraid of giving offense. However, as one who has fortunately survived and overcome the mental manupulation, guilt trips, and ridiculous dogma regulated and fed by a corrupt institution during a typical Catholic upbringing (without any physical abuse - thank heavens - my parents never left me alone with a priest!) I'm certain that many practicing Catholics will express some degree of offense to the film. They will claim a lack of respect or "misrepresentation" of belief and/or practice. This defensive response comes from insecure feelings of their own, as they must know deep down just how absurd and irrational these beliefs are, these tenets of Catholicism, that their faith forces upon their mind.

If an alien were to land on earth, and we fully explained to it, without any corraborating scientific (or other) evidence whatsoever, that because of some ancient, contradictory and confusing written texts and stories handed down from previous generations, we believed that a "father" god sent his son, also a god, down to earth to be born of a human virgin, was put to death, went down to hell, then came back to life three days later, then ascended into heaven, and will hang out with Dad-god and something called holy spirit for a long time, and then later judge all humanity, the alien would undoubtedly come to one of only two possible conclusions - either we're children still hopelessly clinging to childish fairy tales, or we're stark, raving mad. And of course the alien would be right.