Pope's exorcist calls Harry Potter the 'devil'

  September 5, 2006 at 8:29 PM ET
  Geri     Moreover (via CBC via YubaNet)
  pope, harry potter


Additional controversy seems to be popping up once again in reference to the Harry Potter books and the Vatican. This time, chief exorcist, Rev. Gabriele Amorth statesopens in new window that fictional character Harry Potter is the “king of darkness, the devil” in an interview with Vatican Radio last week.

Rev. Amorth goes on to compare the Potter characters to Stalin and Hitler, and says:

You can tell by their behavior and their actions, from the horrors they committed and the atrocities that were committed on their orders. That's why we need to defend society from demons.

You may remember that last year in another interview on Vatican Radio, Monsignor Peter Fleetwood, an expert on New Age and former official at the Pontifical Council for Culture said that:

...I remain firmly convinced that the Harry Potter novels are very well written. They are written on the classical plot of good versus evil in the standard way that the old myths were written. The characters are built up around that: the goodies and the baddies so to speak, and I can't see that that's a bad thing for children, when goodness, and the people on the side of goodness are portrayed as the ones who will eventually win. Harry's enemies resort to all sorts of evil things, and they are the ones who loose in the end. I don't see what's wrong with that, and I can't see that does any harm to children.

It would seem that personnel from the Vatican cannot agree on Harry Potter.

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