The Catholic church recenty appeared to start embracing some subtle rationalism by saying they were sorry about the whole Galileo thing, and that, perhaps, our star system is<\/strong> heliocentric after all, kinda, sorta. And yes, evolution, hmm..\u00c2\u00a0 it probably\u00c2\u00a0could<\/strong> have happened.<\/p>\n

But the new Pope seems inclined to steer the Catholic church right<\/strong> back to the middle ages. Assisted in the attempt by some of his loyal followers:<\/p>\n

Father Gabriele Amorth, who is Pope Benedict XVI’s\u00c2\u00a0senior exorcist (no really<\/strong>!! I’m not making this up!), takes issue with the Harry Potter books.<\/p>\n

Please read this article<\/a> about Father Gabriele’s insights.<\/p>\n

Too silly for words, really.<\/p>\n

“Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil<\/em>“<\/p>\n

Well, yes, nobody denies that, in fact Harry always takes\u00c2\u00a0on the “king of the darkness” and always wins, he’s the good<\/strong> guy. He defeats the devil, so to say, in every single book. How is this different from\u00c2\u00a0any other fantasy book that deals with the same theme and\u00c2\u00a0is read to kids as bedtime stories all over the world, like, for instance, the bible?\u00c2\u00a0What’s the problem?<\/p>\n

Well, the problem, as Father Gabriele sees it and explains to us, is, that “the books attempt to make a false distinction between black and white magic, when in fact, the distinction “does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

Read that again: “magic is always a turn to the devil<\/em>“<\/p>\n

That<\/strong> is interesting! I have always been taught that Jesus himself performed quite some magic left and right. And isn’t it also true that in order to become a Saint, one has to have performed magic somewhere in ones life? In fact, doesn’t every priest during mass turn to magic, when he performs\u00c2\u00a0a cool trick by the name of transsubstantiation<\/a>?<\/p>\n

I will not spend any words on the lunacy of the \u00c2\u00a0‘remote exorcism’ of Hitler. Other than to remark that it utterly failed (why am I not surprised). That<\/strong> just has too high of a voodoo content for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Catholic church recenty appeared to start embracing some subtle rationalism by saying they were sorry about the whole Galileo thing, and that, perhaps, our star system is heliocentric after all, kinda, sorta. And yes, evolution, hmm..\u00c2\u00a0 it probably\u00c2\u00a0could have happened. But the new Pope seems inclined to steer the Catholic church right back to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}