Vatican City, Dec 19, 2007 / 12:35 pm
The daily edition of the official Vatican newspaper has come out with a harsh criticism of the movie "The Golden Compass, describing it as a hopeless story based on the ideology of the 70's.
In a long editorial article, Andrea Monda, a well known literary and movie critic who writes for several Italian newspapers, says "the Golden Compass of Chris Weisz, is as much of an anti-Christmas film as it can be."
The news that during its opening weekend, the Golden Compass made far less than what New Line expected, “can be consoling,” wrote Monda. In fact, the movie critic thinks that the sales were so bad that it will probably block immediate production of the second book of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials'.
After describing the quest of the movie’s heroine, Lyra, to liberate other children imprisoned by the "Magisterium," L'Osservatore Romano writes: "outside the metaphor of Pullman, it would be necessary to close Christian schools, [cease] the teaching of religion at school, not to speak of the violence that Baptism is to children."