Top 3 Movies Banned by the Vatican, One Was Too Eco-Friendly

The 1971 movie the Devils was banned in Finland, Ireland and Italy, after it portrayed a 17th century French priest executed for witchcraft.

In the movie, an evil Cardinal Richelieu, feeling powerless over the little congregation led by innocent Father Grandier, relocates him to a devil-possessed nunnery, in an attempt to destroy his credibility and mental stamina.

The repressed mother superior then becomes obsessed with him, and finds his appeal so powerful that it is deemed the hand of the Devil. She accuses him of sorcery and evil spells, and he is burnt to the stake, the IMDB description reads.

The Da Vinci Code is the one that probably caused the Catholic Church the most unrest. The adaptation of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel was boycotted by the Vatican, and its “godless” sequel, Angels & Demons, banned altogether.

In the movie, symbologist Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks, comes across a long kept secret embedded in Da Vinci's masterwork The Last Supper. The plot reveals that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were, in fact, a couple, that had produced a daughter by the name of Sara.

An unlikely entry on this list is the 2009 Avatar, one of the highest grossing movies of all time. Director James Cameron's sci-fi flick was described as promoting “a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature,” by L’Osservatore Romano.

By banning Avatar, the church tried to set boundaries and identify when loving nature becomes a religion. The film "cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium," the Vatican Radio announced at the time.