Each generation has had to contend with the dark whispers of Satan cunningly hidden in everyday items of popular culture. For my generation growing up in the 80’s it was the subliminal Satanic backmasking in heavy metal music that brainwashed and influenced many teenagers into performing immoral oftentimes self-destructive acts of deviance and depravity like getting to second base with your girlfriend, growing a mullet and a cheesy moustache and even wearing a white tuxedo to the junior AND senior prom. Evil, pure evil.
In the 70’s the Devil was pervasive as the “demonic child” in movies like The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and Herbie the Love Bug while in the 60’s he was disguised as Lyndon B. Johnson, but the children of the new millennium have to contend with a wickedness far worse than trying to match a red cummerbund to your date’s corsage or figuring out how to undo the damn hook and eye clasp of her bra with one hand.
In an article entitled “The Double Face of Harry Potter” published this week in the Vatican’s official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, the Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI claimed Harry Potter is driving kids to Satanism. (Are we there yet? No. Are we there yet? No. I have to go to the bathroom. Well you should have gone before we left.) In fact, the Church went so far as to accuse JK Rowling's hero of encouraging young readers to become Satan worshippers.
Despite the publisher’s rebuttal reminding the Holy Pontiff and his congregation that Harry Potter’s long-running battle against the evil Voldemort is proof that he is a force for good, the article goes on to accuse Harry of New Age Spirituality that leads to an “unhealthy interest” in the devil. Is there a healthy interest in the Devil I’m not aware of? Perhaps something I can put on my toast in the morning that isn’t loaded down with all that fire and brimstone, something like “I Can’t Believe it’s not Satan”.
"We are told that... some things are not bad in themselves if used for a good purpose: violence becomes good, if in the right hands and the right people and maybe in the right dose.” The article reads, “Thus Harry Potter proposes a wrong and malicious image of the hero, an unreligious one." Right, because Christianity would never use violence to justify a struggle for a supreme cause. *Cough Crusades* Sorry, I’ve got a little hypocrisy caught in my throat.
When Rowling’s best-seller Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows was released last year the Vatican was quick to label her books as immoral and that they “...transmit a vision of the world and the human being full of deep mistakes and dangerous suggestions, even more seductive since it is mixed with half-truths.” A book about the imperfections of humanity that seduces people with vague promises and half-truths? That sounds really familiar.
Listen Vatican, nobody’s worshipping Satan because they read Harry Potter. The series has inspired millions of children who otherwise might not have picked a book to read, but not just to read to WANT to read. The books are about right over wrong, good over evil, standing up for what you believe in, being a true friend and yes, about wizardry, casting spells and performing magic. I don’t think we have to break out the Holy Water and start chanting “The Power of Christ Compels You” quite yet.
Unless you think it’ll help me unclasp a bra faster.
