Magic in Literature

Yahoo! states that the Vatican and its official newspaper continue one line of praise of Harry Potter with a positive endorsement of the Half-Blood Prince movie:

The Vatican lauded the latest Harry Potter film on Monday, saying “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” made the age-old debate over good vs. evil crystal clear.The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano even gave two thumbs up to the film’s treatment of adolescent love, saying it achieved the “correct balance” and made the stars more credible to the general audience.

The newspaper said the film, which opens Wednesday, was the best adaptation yet of the J.K. Rowling series about the adventures of the bespectacled child wizard Harry Potter and his Hogwarts chums as they battle Harry’s nemesis, the evil sorcerer Voldemort.

They do qualify their endorsement, arguing that the books show no “explicit ‘reference to the transcendent’.”  (Can’t wait to see how patrons respond to that…)  More than a year ago, L’Osservatore Romano also ran a stringent critique of HP by Edoardo Rialti:

The author recalls Tolkien’s essays about fables, in which he says that “fables can depart from the physical world and the universe created, but not from the moral order: we can imagine a universe illuminated by a green sun, but we cannot bulk to the temptation of presenting as positive a reality in which the moral and spiritual structure are inverted or confused, a world in which evil is good.”

“And this is exactly what happens in Harry Potter,” L’Osservatore says. “Despite several positive values that can be found in the story, at the foundations of this tale is the proposal that of witchcraft as positive, the violent manipulation of things and people thanks to the knowledge of the occult, an advantage of a select few: 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.”

One thing all this makes crystal clear:  If the Vatican feels compelled to offer comment, Harry Potter will continue to draw interest far past its media heyday.

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