While the headline “Pope Opposes Harry Potter Novels” is a bit misleading (the comments date back to May 2003), the gist of the story about then-Cardinal Ratzinger writing approvingly to someone who’d offered her critique of the HP books (that they “corrupt the hearts of the young, preventing them from developing a properly ordered sense of good and evil, thus harming their relationship with God while that relationship is still in its infancy”) to his office is still amusing in both its brevity and scope.
Many thanks for your kind letter of February 20th and the informative book which you sent me in the same mail. 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.
Of course, the site posting these letters is hardly a fan of the HP books to begin with.
Offered without more comment than a weary sigh.
(via the Flea)