Vatican City, Jan 14, 2008 / 14:45 pm
J.K. Rowling's successful character Harry Potter is the wrong model of a hero, says the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano in its Monday-Tuesday edition.
In an article signed by Edoardo Rialti, L'Osservatore says that many have tried to establish a parallel between Rowling's main character and "the great fantasy masterpieces of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Clive Staples Lewis, the Christian authors of the most beloved fables of the 20th Century."
Rialti says that despite the "superficially apparent common points" between Harry Potter and the heroes in Tolkien's and Lewis' stories, Rowling "transmits 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 and compelling story-telling."
The author recalls Tolkien's essays about fables, in which he says that "fables can depart from the physical world and the universe created, but not from the moral order: we can imagine a universe illuminated by a green sun, but we cannot bulk to the temptation of presenting as positive a reality in which the moral and spiritual structure are inverted or confused, a world in which evil is good."