it has been said that quarrels between Catholics are often particularly fierce

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Reading the following piece of nonsense will show you why. These people are trying to apply their own little and stupid criteria to something they fail to understand, and they have the nerve to claim that their criteria are Catholic. Faced with this sort of thing, people like me feel that their Church and their faith is being hijacked; and naturally we do not like it.
Canada Opens First “Hogwarts” Witchcraft School



By Terry Vanderheyden

EDMONTON, January 18, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – It would seem there is truth to the warnings against the Harry Potter series if the opening of an honest-to-goodness witchcraft school in Canada is any indication of increased interest in the occult that has resulted from the books.

The new school, Northern Star College of Mystical Studies, is compared to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the Harry Potter books by a CanWest News Service report. The school offers diploma and two-year certificate programs, open to adults only. The school teaches potions, astrology, tarot, hypnotherapy, divination, magic and other occult practices, among other subjects.

“Harry Potter starts to get everybody curious about the mystic inside of them,” admitted Catherine Potter, a hypnotherapist and professional astrologer who teaches at the school. She is a fan of J.K. Rowling’s bestselling series. “I think it stirs a yearning in people to know more than just the five senses.”

Despite naysayers, Potter’s own admission that Harry Potter spurned her interest in the occult confirms warnings like those from Pope Benedict XVI, Gabriele Kuby, Catholic artist and author Michael D. O’Brien, Father Alfonso Aguilar, and even Rome’s official exorcist, Fr. Gabriele Amorth, who said, “Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.”

In a letter dated March 7, 2003 Pope Benedict XVI – then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – thanked his friend Gabriele Kuby for her “instructive” book about Harry Potter – gut oder böse (Harry Potter- good or evil?), in which Kuby says the Potter books 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.

“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,” the Pope wrote.

Both O’Brien and Father Alfonso Aguilar meanwhile condemn the books for their similarities with an early anti-Christian cult known as Gnosticism. “The wizard world is about the pursuit of power and esoteric knowledge, and in this sense it is a modern representation of a branch of ancient Gnosticism, the cult that came close to undermining Christianity at its birth,” O’Brien explained in his essay, Harry Potter and the Paganization of Children's Culture, available here: http://www.lifesite.net/features/harrypotter/obrienpotter.html.

“The so-called ‘Christian Gnostics’ of the 2nd century were in no way Christian, for they attempted to neutralize the meaning of the Incarnation and to distort the concept of salvation along traditional Gnostic lines: man saves himself by obtaining secret knowledge and power,” O’Brien wrote.

Defending his criticism of Rowling’s work as compared to JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who some argue also portrays magic, O’Brien added: “Rowling portrays Harry’s victory as the fruit of esoteric knowledge and power. This is Gnosticism. Tolkien portrays Frodo’s victory as the fruit of humility, obedience, and courage in a state of radical suffering. This is Christianity.”

Comments

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I wish. I think it is the violent inferiority complex with respect to the United States. The Liberals have gone PC in an insane and dictatorial way in order to distinguish their country from the supposedly gun-mad, fundamentalist and reactionary country to the south - and the conservatives, in turn, have been poisoned by the extremism of what passes for the mainstream.