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Villains in the Vatican

From Foreign Office memo writers to prescient novelists, the pope and Catholicism have become the evil force of choice

The weekend’s leaked Foreign Office memo means that catholic clergy and Vatican officials will continue to find that newspapers make for painful reading. And for the next few years they should probably be nervous of the bookshop: the scandal over the protection of paedophile priests will inspire a lot of volumes. Indeed, long before this horrible saga of abuse and denial claimed international headlines, it had already spawned a significant literature. The writers of popular fiction stand revealed as preachers and prophets.

Three of the most powerful fictional franchises of the last decade are Dan Brown’s trilogy about Harvard cryptologist Robert Langdon; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter septet. And, oddly, all three forest-clearing phenomena are explicitly or implicitly opposed to the Roman Catholic church.

In Brown’s Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, Langdon tackles baddies in the Vatican. And, although many readers were unaware of Pullman’s dogmatic under-structure until he began to spell it out in Dawkinsesque interviews, the Magisterium, the evil empire in his best-known trio, took its name from a historical term for Catholicism.

JK Rowling’s conflict with the bishops is more tangential. In creating a fantasy around a necromantic academy, she was not intentionally going for Rome, but Pope Benedict went for her. And, as a result of this, three of the most read authors at the start of the 21st century found themselves in opposition to the pope – a cultural position that, amid the scandals of clerical pederasty, looks strikingly prescient ’
 
hmmm… I think the columnist is overreaching. Certainly Dan Brown’s books are anti-Catholic, and reportedly, to a lesser degree, are those of Philip Pullman. But JK Rowling??

And while I agree that Catholic Church bashing as become popular among those on the left side of the political spectrum, I don’t think we can regard Brown, Pullman and Rowling as “preachers and prophets” of this inclination. I have seen no evidence that the anti-Catholic remarks are inspired by those authors, and I strongly suspect such remarks would occur if the authors had never been born.

The columnist later in his article says that the authors are simply distilling the currents in our culture. Well, that may be true. But Brown’s anti-Catholicism has roots much deeper than the past 100 years. Pullman seems to be distilling secularism more so than anti-Catholicism. And Rowling…? I’m sorry but she just doesn’t belong in this discussion.
 
Tybourne said:
JK Rowling’s conflict with the bishops is more tangential. In creating a fantasy around a necromantic academy, she was not intentionally going for Rome, but Pope Benedict went for her. And, as a result of this, three of the most read authors at the start of the 21st century found themselves in opposition to the pope – a cultural position that, amid the scandals of clerical pederasty, looks strikingly prescient.
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Brown and Pullman I get but Rowling?

Let’s not turn this into an anti-Potter thread. The only reason why she and the Pope seem butting heads is because a few fanatics decided to put the two in the ring in the first place. -_-;;
 
The editorial writer may be overreaching a little, but since the end of the Second World War there has been a gradually developing tendency in popular literature to delve into religious subjects and institutions that would have been unthinkable earlier. (This coincides with a large literature responding to increased public interest in religious subjects, particularly Jesus.) Brown’s books seem to me not so much to be against the Church, but against certain highly placed church authorities, as for example, in Angels and Demons, where a misguided camerlengo sought to bring the Church back to what he believed was right by murdering the Pope.

As for Rowling, some seem to think the books are demonic; I guess the Pope does too. But to accuse the Potter books as being anti-catholic seems to be a stretch.
 
Yeah I have no idea why Rowling’s books are here. I read all of them when they came out and they were as entertaining as the witch/monster stories of the brother Grimm.

The Da Vinci Code was badly written and a poor thriller. However, I recognized it as a made up fictional tale. If Dan Brown could convince me that Jesus married Marry Magdalene then I have bigger problems that reading a cheap thriller.
 
I don’t get how Rowling ended up here either. Maybe you could argue that a few elements in the books are not fully within Catholic doctrine, but there’s no way you could argue that they’re outright anti-Catholic. Like you’d have to find so much subtext that you’d have to throw out the story itself.
 
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