By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Contrary to earlier reviews in which Harry Potter was called the wrong image of a hero,” a review of the latest Harry Potter film in the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano says that while the movie may be too scary for young viewers, the story champions the values of friendship and sacrifice.
The Catholic News Service is reporting that in a review written for L’Osservatore Romano about tonight’s premier of the film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Gaetano Vallini said that while the movie is dark enough to disturb younger audiences, the story line presents evil in the proper context.
“As for the content, evil is never presented as fascinating or attractive in the saga, but the values of friendship and of sacrifice are highlighted. In a unique and long story of formation, through painful passages of dealing with death and loss, the hero and his companions mature from the lightheartedness of infancy to the complex reality of adulthood,” he said.
Vallini says that young people have grown up with Potter through reading the seven books in the series “and they certainly have understood that magic is only a narrative pretext useful in the battle against an unrealistic search for immortality.”
In a second review appearing in the same issue, Antonio Carriero said the saga championed Christian values, such as how Potter’s archenemy, Lord Voldemort, chooses not to love others and sees himself as the center of the universe.
Rather than being a figure of the devil, Carriero said Voldemort is like many modern men and women who think they can do without God and without others, who say they don’t believe in heaven and yet are the most afraid of dying.
“Eternal life is reached through death, not without it,” Carriero writes. “And Harry Potter, although he never declared himself a Christian, calls on the dark magician to mend his ways, repent for what he has done and recognize the primacy of love over everything so he will not be damned for eternity.”
This review is in stark contrast to one that appeared in the same paper in 2008 in which Edoardo Rialti said that despite the seemingly Christian 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.”
He adds, “This is a grave and deep lie, because it is the old Gnostic temptation of confusing salvation and truth with a secret knowledge.”
Even though Harry is presented as being rich in Christian values, he is very unlike the characters found in Christian fantasy classics such as those written by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. ” . . . (T)he main characters of the great fables never become magicians, and the seductive power of magic has always had grave and destructive consequences: the stories of Tolkien and Lewis describe the rejection of magic and power, not of a certain magic and a certain power, but of power and magic as such.”
Therefore, Rialti argues, “There is nothing more antithetical to Harry Potter than Tolkien’s young Frodo or Lewis’ Pevensie siblings.”
Tolkien and Lewis portray “the extraordinary discovery of true Christianity, for which the main character of history is not an exceptional human being, like in the ancient paganism or in today’s ideologies, but a person who says yes to the initiatives of God’s mysteries.”
Instead, “Harry Potter shows a pale disregard for the ‘muggles’, the common human beings who do not have magic,” Rialti points out.
In Rowling’s stories “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.” In the Bible, the Devil “never says ‘there is no God’, but presents instead the seductive proposition: ‘you will be like God’.”
Rialti also points out that then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s criticism of Potter, as expressed to German journalist Gabriele Kuby, remains more relevant than ever. In correspondence to Kuby, Cardinal Ratzinger said: “It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”
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Our on-line store offers a variety of resources on this subject by one of the world’s most renowned experts on fantasy literature – Michael O’Brien:
Frightening Fantasies: Harry Potter and the Paganization of our Children’s Culture with Steve Wood and Michael O’Brien Part 1 and Part II
