The latest Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince release was surprisingly praised by the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, as “a clear link of demarcation between good and evil” and “making clear that good is right”, the Timesonline said.
L’Osservatore Romano sided with Harry in his battle with You Know Who, arguing that the film promoted the values of friendship, altruism and loyalty.
The paper also said the film’s depiction of adolescent love had the “correct balance”, but criticised the movie for making no clear reference to the transcendent.
According to the Timesonline, now the Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, appears to have fallen under the latest Potter spell.
In 2003, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he criticised the books about the teenage wizard for “distorting Christianity” in young people.
In a letter in March 2003 to the German Catholic sociologist Gabriele Kuby, author of Harry Potter – Good or Evil, the Pope expressed his concern that Rowling’s stories of the boy wizard threatened to corrupt an understanding of Christian faith among the impressionable young.
He went on to say the Harry Potter creation was anti-religious and encouraged the occult, “because this is a subtle seduction, which has deeply unnoticed and direct effects in undermining the soul of Christianity before it can really grow properly.”
In 2008, under the headline “The Double Face of Harry Potter”, L’Osservatore Romano said the series was “rich in Christian values” but ultimately offered a “malicious and unreligious” hero as a model for the young.
Edoardo Rialti, professor of literature at Florence University and translator of Tolkien and CS Lewis into Italian, said Ms Rowling “transmits a vision of the world and human beings full of deep mistakes and dangerous suggestions, even more seductive since it is mixed with half truths and compelling storytelling.”
This time the film’s reviewers praised the special effects in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth Potter film, which again stars Daniel Radcliffe as the young wizard.
The changing attitude towards the film by the Vatican newspaper represents a remarkable U-turn that has previously attacked the series, saying that, although the books had narrative value, they held up witchcraft and the occult as positive ideals.
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