Harry Potter and the Cultural Black Hole

Mark Shea today tackles the Know-Nothing wing of the Church, which is still on a toot about Harry Potter and the Minion of Satan (TM) who created him.

This stripe of Catholic is virtually indistinguishable from Falwellian fundamentalists -- indeed, many of them used to be Falwellian fundamentalists . . . or Pat Robertson charismatics -- except for their fundamental belief in the basics of Catholic belief. The Catholic cultural thing, they haven't got such a grip on.

Nor do they have too much of a grip on the basic premise that the Almighty gave humans a brain -- and an intellect -- for sound reasons.

Shea unloads on one of the chief Catholic critics of J.K. Rowling's (hence referred to as She Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken) masterful series, Michael O'Brien, who is quoted in this Washington Times article. Shea writes:

In short, O'Brien talks about Rowling's conversion of more of the devil's real estate into Christendom as though it were a *bad* thing. It's a classic fundamentalist mistake which assumes that imagery borrowed from paganism must corrupt the Faith rather than assuming that the Holy Spirit has the power to sanctify the image. It's like those Chick tracts that say "Egyptians used sun disks in their art, so Catholic art with haloes is a pagan snare to the soul!" As I say, I think the devil must be fit to be tied at Rowling's jiu jitsu: taking the image of the mage and "perverting" it to the service of the gospel. I wish O'Brien would drop this silly vendetta.

IN FAIRNESS, O'Brien isn't the only Wahabbi Catholic out there cracking on the books of She Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. Steve Wood would be another one -- and he's got an EWTN radio show to use as a bully pulpit in trying to shoehorn a round Catholic culture into the square hole of his former evangelical Protestant beliefs.

In an essay on his website, Wood notes that he used to be involved in the New Age and decries the Harry Potter series' potential to draw susceptible young minds into the world of the occult:

The majority of those who fool around with Dungeons and Dragons, toy with Ouija boards, listen to heavy metal rock, or read books like the Harry Potter series that are filled with themes with witchcraft and sorcery, will never fall into any permanent spiritual deceptions. Yet, I can guarantee that Harry Potter will be an entry point into the demonic /New Age world for thousands of young Catholics. Many Christians scoffed at the potential dangers posed by Dungeons and Dragons, yet research has validated those warnings.

AND CHURCH AUTHORITIES should put the collected works of William Shakespeare on a revived Index of Forbidden Books because Falstaff will tempt us to obese, drunken gluttony and Othello will cause us to murder our wives. Don't get me started on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.

Expecto Patronum!

I just committed sorcery. Steve Wood is now a newt.

What??? I'm informed Steve Wood is not now nor ever has been a newt, despite my spell. I don't understand . . . I watched two of the Harry Potter movies, already!

Snarkiness aside, the last thing a Church which has all but abandoned its social and liturgical patrimony needs is to import -- to be uncharitable, but I know no other way of putting it -- fundamentalist and evangelical iconoclasm, which has worked its way into a historical disdain of art, literature and intellectual pursuits.

To the Steve Woods of the world, art seemingly is utilitarian at best. You use art to bait-and-switch someone into Christian faith; Satan uses it to top off Gehenna. But never can it organically flow out of our human experience . . . of our Christian experience.

And while I am glad that ex-New Agers who become evangelicals who become Catholics have come into the fullness of the faith, I really wish they could find it within themselves to become catholic as well as Catholic.

The phenomenon of orthodox Catholic hyperpious know-nothingism has vexed me for almost as long as I've been Catholic. A priest friend once wrote me that it's the byproduct of the utter collapse of anything resembling a Catholic culture, which no American Catholic under 45 ever has experienced.

We Catholics who fancy ourselves as possessing some degree of cultural sophistication, and who came into the faith -- by birth or conversion -- after Vatican II was a done deal basically don't have a clue about being authentically well-rounded, lives-in-balance Catholics.

Some of us make game stabs at it. Some of us get pretty close. Others just become susperstitious Puritans with sacraments.

Jansenism -- a puritanical Catholic heresy -- is the gift that keeps on giving, apparently.

FOR EXAMPLE, do you think EWTN would ever do a full-blown, uncensored theatrical version of just about any Walker Percy novel or any Flannery O'Connor short story? The blue-hairs would get the vapors!

Others, meanwhile, would find such programming just not "religious" enough, or that it really wasn't "teaching the faith."

The Harry Potter tempest and the neo-Jansenist revulsion at the artistic for its own sake point to the central problem of contemporary Catholicism as you find it in everyday life: The Catholic mind is dead.

The liberals are loony New Agers, and the "orthodox" -- particularly some charismatics, I think -- are sliding fast into some sort of Magisterial offshoot of the Primitive Baptists, with a dash of mystical apocalypticism thrown in with a subtext of the worst of Evangelical faddishness.

I recall one time, during my days in Catholic radio, when Father Stephen Valenta, a charismatic guru, and Steve Wood were the speakers at a conference our station sponsored. Father Valenta, a Conventual Fransiscan evangelist, expounded on how we ought not think, that our thinking gets in the way of the Holy Spirit acting.

Folks went gaga over him. I was going "Huh?"

He also was fairly apocalyptic (real Spirit Daily type stuff), and boasted that he hadn't read more than five books in however many years -- the Spirit reveals to him everything he needs to know. It sounded to me too bloody much like Magisterial snake-handling.

The Steve Wood talk I recall involved a condemnation of dating for Christians, advocating instead the concept of "courtship." If you've got the money, honey, he's got the CD here.

Often, I look at the Catholic wreckage surrounding me -- a religious and cultural landscape laid waste by the war machines of secularism, consumerism and plain old nutism -- and I wonder what Father Chuck O'Malley or Sister Liguori would make of any of it.