Found this is the newspaper this week which, needless to say, made me laugh my ass off.

The Vatican's chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth said: "You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a likeable wizard, but you end up with the Devil. There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books. By reading Harry Potter a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil."

Fucking loony. This coming from a guy whose job is to slap people around with a book and throw water at them in order to exorcise non-existent demons. The nut then went on to criticise the ‘disordered morality’ presented in Rowling’s novels. A priest talking about disordered morality? Has he not even read the bible, or heard about what catholic priests have been up to in recent times? Religion once again proves itself synonymous with hypocrisy.

The most interesting quote, however, was this old gem from the new pope, Benedict XVI. He said that Harry Potter was a bad influence because it contains:

"seductions which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly".

Translation: We don’t want kids to be taken in by Rowling’s fictional stories before we get a chance to mindfuck them properly with our fictional stories. What an asshole.