“You mean the day they stop needing the church,” she shouts, weaving together the novel’s main themes. “But the church is not the only enlightened soul on the planet! We all seek God in different ways. …

“God is not some omnipotent authority looking down from above, threatening to throw us into a pit of fire if we disobey. God is the energy that flows through the synapses of our nervous system and the chambers of our hearts! God is in all things!”

This long speech is not in the movie based on Brown’s first novel about the dashing Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who uses his encyclopedic knowledge of art, religion, history, literature, architecture and archeology to crack through layers of ancient conspiracies that bedevil modern humanity.

This is, however, a speech that — as a sermon by the author — offers insights into the worldview behind “Angels & Demons” and the novel that followed it.

That, of course, was “The Da Vinci Code,” which ignited a global firestorm because of its depiction of Jesus as a brilliant, charismatic and ultimately misunderstood mortal man who married the brilliant, charismatic and misunderstood Mary Magdalene and had a child with her before his untimely death. This power couple’s goal was to create an inclusive, dogma-free, sexually enlightened faith. But, alas, the power-hungry patriarchs who created Christianity — especially the Roman Catholic Church — conspired to wreck and bury their work.

Director Ron Howard, who also directed “The Da Vinci Code” movie, admits that large parts of “Angels & Demons” were scrapped and rewritten while turning the prequel into a sequel. Brown gave his blessing since the book’s major themes remained intact.

As with “The Da Vinci Code,” Howard is convinced that he has not created an anti-Catholic film. His goal, he said, was to raise questions about the nature of faith.

“I believe in God, yes, I do. I’m not a member of a church at the moment,” he told reporters, before “Angels & Demons” reached theaters. “There is no personal struggle, for me, between my beliefs and religion. Basically, in a nutshell, I believe that our intelligence, and our curiosity, and our drive to know more are a part of the plan. … But I haven’t worked to directly sort of inject my personal spirituality and belief system into the story.”

The goal, while spinning another conspiracy-theory thriller, was to focus on “the threat that some in the Vatican may feel about what science represents, what it proposes to say about the origins of the universe and the origins of man,” he said.

The plot begins with the sudden death of a “progressive and beloved pope.” Then, all hell breaks loose as someone claiming to represent a secret society of freethinkers called the “Illuminati” kidnaps what the book describes as the four “liberal,” reform-minded cardinals who were the top candidates to become pope and begins murdering them in public rituals.

As the coup de grace, this mysterious killer has arranged to steal a container of antimatter produced at the CERN Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border. Langdon and Vetra have to rush around — call it “24” meets a papal conclave — and find this missing “God particle” stuff before it explodes and vaporizes Vatican City.

By the time it’s all over, Langdon and company have solved a papal-murder mystery, saved the enlightened cardinal who ultimately becomes pope and, literally, saved the throne of St. Peter from being captured a madman who is, of course, the story’s most articulate conservative Catholic.

This villain “feels that the church is going down the wrong path” as it pursues peace with science and modernity, noted actor Ewan McGregor. “He thinks that the church is becoming watered down and is becoming weaker and weaker. … He’s trying to put it back on course.”

The key is that “Angels & Demons” offers a Vatican that contains good Catholics and bad Catholics. By the end of the film, said Howard, Langdon has gained a “more complex view of the church.”

In the end, there are good Catholics and bad Catholics and Brown and Howard get to determine who is who.

Parishioners in East Harlem have decided to conduct a vigil in a beloved old sanctuary because church leaders plan to lock the doors — forever. The Archdiocese of New York recently said it would close or merge 21 churches in order to gather more people in fewer pews to be served by a declining number of priests.

A parishioner at Our Lady Queen of Angels told the New York Times: “People have been baptized here and married here, received first communion here. … When they close the church, we are going to stay inside.”

This is one image of American Catholic life today.

However, it’s only part of a bigger picture, said Steven Wagner of QEV Analytics in Washington, D.C. While parishes are closing in regions long known as Catholic strongholds, more missions are opening in regions where the Catholic flock is small — but vital.

For every Boston, there is a Knoxville, Tenn. For every Philadelphia, there is a Savannah, Ga.

“The church is closing parishes in the Northeast, but Catholics are building them in the South and the Southwest,” said Wagner. “We know that a lot of that is driven by immigration and population trends. ? So if you really want to know where Catholicism is alive and where it’s struggling, you can’t just look at membership statistics. You have to ask other questions.”

That’s what Wagner and co-writer Father Rodger Hunter-Hall have tried to do in a study entitled “The State of the Catholic Church in America, Diocese by Diocese,” conducted for the conservative Crisis magazine. Using statistics from the Official Catholic Directory they ranked the 176 Latin Rite dioceses in three crucial areas. Their goal was to study the role played by local bishops between 1995 and 2005.

In an attempt to gauge clergy morale, they determined if the number of active priests in a diocese was rising or falling. Five dioceses stayed the same, 29 experienced growth and 141 suffered deceases.

Then Wagner and Hunter-Hall counted the number of priests being ordained, using a scale that did not discriminate against small dioceses. On the negative end of the scale, 48 dioceses had zero ordinations in 2005 — including large Sunbelt dioceses in Dallas and Houston.

“All kinds of factors can affect morale and the number of ordinations,” said Hunter-Hall, who teaches at Christendom College in Front Royal, Va. “But these statistics at least provide insights into whether a bishop is attracting new priests and whether or not he has created a climate that makes men want to serve in his diocese.”

To gauge the effectiveness of evangelism efforts, they charted the number of adult converts in each diocese. Once again, Wagner and Hunter-Hall stressed that Catholicism is experiencing rapid growth in some regions due to immigration and, as always, many people enter the church through intermarriage.

However, that kind of growth “isn’t the same thing as people making decisions to convert because of the faith itself,” said Hunter-Hall. “If you see converts streaming into the church, that almost always tells you something about the spiritual climate in a diocese. That usually has something to do with the bishop.”

Finally, the researchers combined these three factors and determined which dioceses that they thought had improved and declined the most during the past decade. The top 20 list was dominated by small dioceses — including a stunning number in the Bible Belt. The sharpest declines were in the Northeast, especially New England.

Thus, Wagner and Hunter-Hall noted: “The church is … most healthy in that region that is traditionally the least hospitable to it, and is least healthy in that region where it has the longest history, and in which are found the greatest concentration of Catholics (as a percentage of the population) and the largest number of Catholics.”

Size is not always a virtue and, it seems, the first may become the last. Small dioceses — especially in “missionary” regions — consistently attracted more converts and more new priests.

“It sounds strange, but if you’re a Catholic and you want to go where the action is you need to go to places like Alexandria (La.) Tyler (Texas) and Biloxi (Miss.),” said Wagner. “Catholics all over America are facing unique challenges. It seems that some people are handling them better than others.”

recording of the “Ave Maria” for Father Paul Zahl to feel that old,

familiar tug at his heartstrings.

Then came the voices in his head asking those nagging questions that many

weary Episcopalians have pondered in recent decades: “Why keep fighting?

Why not join the Roman Catholic Church?”

Every now and then, Zahl feels another urge to “swim the Tiber.” This is

somewhat problematic because he is dean of the Trinity School for

Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., a post that makes him a leader among

Evangelicals in the embattled Episcopal Church and a strategic voice in

the broadly Protestant, low-church wing of the global Anglican Communion.

“I could become a Roman Catholic in a heartbeat,” said Zahl. “But the

minute I say that, I stop and think about it and I know all the reasons

that I am an Evangelical and why my spiritual home is in Anglicanism. …

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand why so many people —

people I love and respect — have fled to Rome and why many more will

follow them.”

Many Episcopalians, stressed Zahl, are seeking what he called a “truly

objective form of church life” that provides authoritative answers to the

moral and doctrinal questions that have — for at least a quarter century

— caused bitter conflict and declining statistics in the American branch

of Anglicanism. Their complaints run much deeper than mere discontent

over the 2003 consecration of a noncelibate homosexual as the Episcopal

bishop in New Hampshire.

But if they want that kind of church structure they are going to have to

join that kind of church, he said. The Anglican approach, built on a

unique blend of compromises between Protestantism and Catholicism, will

never be enough.

“Anglicanism can only give you an ersatz form of that kind of church,”

said Zahl, a Harvard man whose graduate work took him to England and

Germany. “If you want the kind of authority that comes with Roman

Catholicism then you should run, not walk, to enter the Church of Rome. …

That’s where you have to go to find it. You either become a Catholic or

you simply stop asking the big questions about ecclesiastical structure.

You move on.”

This will be a painful step for some Episcopalians to take, in an age

when newspapers are full of reports about legal and theological cracks in

the foundations of the mother Church of England and its bickering

relatives around the world.

The big news on this side of the Atlantic Ocean is that eight

congregations in Northern Virginia — including two of America’s most

historic parishes — have voted to leave the Episcopal Church to join a

new missionary effort tied to the conservative, rapidly growing Anglican

Church of Nigeria.

Meanwhile, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams faces a revolt in his

own backyard, with Evangelical leaders saying they will revolt if he does

not allow them to answer to conservative bishops, rather than to

liberals. And then there was that Sunday Times report claiming that Pope

Benedict XVI has asked officials in his Congregation for the Doctrine of

the Faith to research ways to reach out to disaffected Anglicans.

The temptation, according to Zahl, is for Episcopalians caught in these

conflicts to assume there is “some church body out there, some

supervising entity or person, which, when we find it, will be seen

definitely to be ‘The One.’ The question of ‘Whither?’ is based on the

idea that there is, at this point in time, a verifiable protecting safe

place.”

Instead, those committed to Anglicanism must embrace another image of the

Christian life found in scripture, argued Zahl, in a missive to

supporters of his seminary. While it will be hard, they should see

themselves as the “wandering people of God” who must spend a long time in

the wilderness as they “seek the city which is to come.”

It will be hard to find clarity and unity during the years ahead, he said.

“I hold out exactly no hope of a safe haven in the Church of England,”

said Zahl. “If you have any hope of finding safe answers for the big

questions of church identity within Anglicanism, then you are going to

need to be patient because that is not going to happen anytime soon.”