Vatican slams Harry Potter as ‘wrong kind of hero’
- January
- 16
6:52 am Live Theater
LONDON:
The Vatican City has slammed JK Rowling’s Harry Potter as “the wrong kind of
hero” who poses a danger to children across the world.
In a damning article, the
Vatican’s official newspaper ‘L’Osservatore Romano’ has condemned the popular
teenage boy wizard for promoting witchcraft and occult — the Church’s latest
view on the Potter series.
Under the headline ‘The Double
Face of Harry Potter’, the article by an expert in English literature says:
“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.”
The
writer, Professor Edoardo Rialti of Florence University, has also tried to
establish a parallel between the “fantasy masterpieces” — CS Lewis’s
‘Chronicles of Narnia’ and JRR Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ — with Potter,
according to a newspaper.
He
argues that other than “superficially apparent common points”, there’s nothing
similar between the books.
While the works of Tolkien and
Lewis show “a transcendence and the beauty of the infinite”, he claims Harry
Potter books have an “inverted and confused spirituality: A world where bad is
good” and that they are characterised by a “vague, new-age philosophy”.
A spokesman for JK Rowling
has, however, declined to comment.
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