The Double Face of Harry Potter

The Vatican has stepped up its continuing efforts to save the souls of little misguided children and adults who read Harry Potter books. An article - The Double Face of Harry Potter - in Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano condemned Harry Potter, describing the fictional wizard as ''the wrong kind of hero'' who led youngsters to an "unhealthy interest" in satanism.

Despite the values that we come across in the narration, at the base of this story, witchcraft is proposed as a positive ideal. The violent manipulation of things and people comes thanks to knowledge of the occult. The ends justify the means because the knowledgeable, the chosen ones, the intellectuals know how to control the dark powers and turn them into good.

This a grave and deep lie, because it is the old Gnostic temptation of confusing salvation and truth with a secret knowledge. The characterisation of common men who do not know magic as 'muggles' who know nothing other than bad and wicked things is a truly diabolical attitude.

[. . .] we are told that, at the end, some things are not bad in themselves, if used for a good purpose: violence becomes good, if in the right hands and (used by) the right people, and maybe in the right dose.

Thus Harry Potter proposes a wrong and malicious image of the hero, an unreligious one, which is even worst that an explicitly anti-religious proposition.

Reports here and here.