"Villains in the Vatican"?

An interesting piece from The Guardian that takes a look at the curious hostility toward Catholicism from the literary world:

So the last decade's literary demonisation of Catholicism is another example of the nostrils of novelists twitching at a smell in the air. Brown had the practical problem of beginning his career as a thriller writer just as the traditional villains of 20th-century beach reads – the Soviets – had imploded. In locating a replacement, he selected one of the few surviving structures that exercised global influence through rigid central control and had an institutional tendency to secrecy. Yet, though logical, this substitution is ironic because the Catholic church, through Pope John Paul II, had been instrumental in the opposition to Kremlin-led communism.

These books, though, draw on a general liberal hostility to Catholicism (because of its opposition to abortion rights and alleged misogyny) and, in the works of Brown and Pullman, the Vatican may also be a surrogate for other disgusts. At the time their best-known books were written, Catholicism was not the most populous or powerful religion in the world. But, as believers frequently point out on the Guardian letters page and elsewhere, contemporary fiction writers seem shy of depicting Islam. (HG Wells or George Orwell, writing now, would probably not have fixed on priests as a thing to be feared.)