There were no excommunications or top-down, churchwide boycotts to oppose "The Da Vinci Code," the movie many Christians believe distorts the legacy of Jesus Christ.

With a ready-made audience owing to huge sales of the novel of the same name, not to mention copious advance publicity, the movie had a strong box-office opening around the globe.

But according to University of Detroit Mercy marketing professor Michael Bernacchi, such a tempered response from the Catholic Church was exactly what the situation called for.

"The church as a formal, institutional body could not have handled it any better," Bernacchi said after the movie's first week in theaters. "I think they're at the top of their game."

The movie --- which was classified as "morally offensive" by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film & Broadcasting --- made more than $77 million in its first weekend, according to the movie industry Web site BoxOfficeMojo.com.

A highly touted adaptation of a best-selling novel by author Dan Brown, the movie got off to a rocky start at the popular Cannes Film Festival in France, where it was jeered by some critics, but that was because of its artistic execution rather than its anti-Christian content.

But despite the bad press, BoxOfficeMojo.com reports that the movie had the second-largest opening among pictures geared for adults, trailing only Mel Gibson's 2004 movie, "The Passion of the Christ" --- ironically considered by many the most pro-Christian film to hit theaters.

Still, Bernacchi said, if the pope had spoken strongly against "The Da Vinci Code" or had the Vatican pleaded with Catholics to boycott the film, it might have prompted more people to see it.

"Anytime you pronounce you're against anything, inevitably that has some impact on the folks who are on the edges," he told The Michigan Catholic, newspaper of the Detroit Archdiocese.

As it is, Catholics and other Christians organized some opposition to the movie, including some prelates, pastors, Catholic television and radio hosts, and especially the personal prelature of Opus Dei, which was portrayed in Brown's novel and in the film as a secretive cult within the church plotting to take over the church and willing to kill those who stand in its way.

Opus Dei formally requested a disclaimer notifying the audiences that the movie is, indeed, fiction. Anglican officials in London banned the movie's producers from filming scenes in Westminster Abbey. Several Catholic and non-Catholic television programs also have been created to point out the falsehoods of "The Da Vinci Code."

Bernacchi said vocal opposition to the film did help make it more popular --- but it didn't help too much. Brown's novel already was popular, with 60 million copies of the book sold before the movie debuted.

"Inevitably, it probably helped the box office a little bit --- but there's very little box office that needed help," Bernacchi said. "The fact remains that 60 million books were sold."

A USA Today/Gallup Poll of 1,013 adults indicates that most who see "The Da Vinci Code" don't plan on letting it shape their religious perspective. Most adults polled --- 72 percent --- said they see such work as entertainment rather than commentary on religion. Seventy-two percent also said a movie wouldn't affect their religious beliefs.

In an episode of Detroit Cardinal Adam J. Maida's talk show, "Dialogue," that aired on the Catholic Television Network of Detroit, the cardinal urged Catholics to adhere to the truth of Christ, despite popular media's tendency to mix it with fiction for entertainment purposes.

"In many ways, this is a good opportunity for us to catechize, to evangelize, to explain," the cardinal said. "These questions brought up in the novel have been with us for 2,000 years. What we need to understand is that ... in the end ... these are matters of faith, not fiction ... and faith is a gift given to those who can see Jesus as the Son of God. That's our reality."

---CNS