The Church’s Obsession with Harry Potter: Fear, Censorship, and Outdated Beliefs.
I am reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and it got me reflecting on the Catholic Church's fixation with Harry Potter. The saying that truth is often stranger than fiction came to mind when a Catholic primary school in Nashville made international headlines for banning Harry Potter in 2019.
The school removed the books from their library after a Vatican-appointed exorcist claimed the Harry Potter series could summon sinister spirits — this assertion seems more like a plotline from a trashy page-turner than reality. It was just hocus-pocus nonsense in my book.
Ironically, the Bible contains a fair share of miraculous events, like turning water into wine or parting the Red Sea, which some might interpret as the Church’s brand of “sorcery”. That all sounds like something you’d find in a Harry Potter book.
It’s hard to take seriously the idea that Harry Potter books are a genuine threat, as some clergy have suggested in recent years, in both Europe and America. It has also been banned in private schools in the United Arab Emirates. But that is much less of a surprise.
The Catholic Church is “away with the fairies,” to use an Irish expression if they honestly believe Harry Potter books are a force for evil. With the vast amount of pain and suffering in the world, you would think the Catholic Church might focus its efforts on more pressing issues rather than its obsession with banning children’s books and exorcisms.
But apparently not. Such nonsense is not a new fixation. The late Father Amorth, a renowned exorcist, once claimed to have performed 30,000 exorcisms in nine years—an implausible average of nine per day, including Sundays. The Church is happy to perform exorcisms but won’t let kids play-act, pretenting they are Harry Potter doing harmless spells, it seems.
You could dismiss the Nashville incident if it were a one-off incident but many others in the Church and other Christian organisations are also on the same page about Harry Potter novels allegedly fraught with danger. The American Library Association reported that the series topped the list of most challenged books in the early 2000s. In Texas, during the 2001-2002 school year, the books were the top target of censors.
Let’s take two examples: the Catholic Church’s official newspaper even denounced Harry Potter as a “wrong model of a hero,” and some Polish priests have gone so far as to burn copies of the books.
By pushing to censor Harry Potter, the Church is doing a disservice to young people, as books like these often ignite a lifelong passion for reading. My love of literature began in my school library, where I discovered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That book inspired me to pursue journalism and write almost a dozen books. I shudder to think how differently my life might have turned out if CS Lewis’s works had been censored.
Such extreme censorship robs children of joy and imagination, which is exactly what the Church has now taken from those students in Nashville. While this might seem like an isolated incident, as I stated already, it was part of a broader, alarming pattern. Two years before becoming Pope Benedict, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote a letter condemning the Harry Potter books for their “subtle seductions” that supposedly corrupt young minds!
One might have expected the late Ratzinger, of all people, to have a more nuanced understanding of what truly corrupts minds, given his history in the Hitler Youth and later as a Nazi foot soldier.
But perhaps we should not be surprised by such narrow-mindedness considering Ratzinger once blamed the social changes of the 1960s and the rise of hippie culture for the clergy sex abuse crisis—a claim as offensive as it is absurd.
Their ridiculous obsession with Harry Potter shows how out of touch the Church has become in the last 20 years. Pope Francis doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of enticing young people back to the Church when such medieval nonsense is being spouted about a harmless book.
The next Pope faces an uphill battle in reconnecting with younger generations with outdated and reactionary views. It’s time for them to close the chapter on such nonsense and focus on more meaningful issues.
