IN a move that suggests it desperately wants to be seen as “cool”, the Vatican has done a U-turn on Harry Potter, which the Pope once condemned for “undermining the soul of Christianity”.

In 2003, two years before he was elected Pope, Joseph “Boy Nazi” Ratzinger, then a Cardinal and head of Vatican doctrine, said that J K Rowling’s stories of the boy wizard threatened to corrupt an understanding of Christian faith among the impressionable young.

He then said in a letter to a critic of the books, who argued that they were anti-religious and encouraged the occult:

It is good that you explain the facts of Harry Potter because this is a subtle seduction, which has deeply unnoticed and direct effects in undermining the soul of Christianity before it can really grow properly.

But now the latest in the film series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has won surprising praise from the Vatican newspaper. L’Osservatore Romano said this week that even though the Potter saga lacked what it called “a reference to the transcendent”, the film drew:

A clear line of demarcation between good and evil, making clear that good is right, and that in some cases this involves hard work and sacrifices.

This, reports The Times, represents a remarkable U-turn by a paper that has previously attacked the series, saying that, although the books had narrative value, they held up witchcraft and the occult as positive ideals, unlike The Chronicles of Narnia by C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Last year the paper argued that Harry, played by atheist, gay-friendly Daniel Radcliffe, was the wrong kind of hero and the stories, although compelling, were full of half truths, offering a view:

Full of deep mistakes and dangerous suggestions.

This time its reviewer praised the special effects in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth Potter film.

Now we know that this has nothing to do with religion, unless you are a Rastafarian, but we have just learned that another actor in the Harry Potter movie, Jamie Waylett, who plays school bully Vincent Crabbe, pleaded guilty, during a hearing yesterday at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, to growing pot.

Police found eight bags of cannabis and a knife during a search of a car Waylett was riding in. They then searched his mother’s house and found ten marijuana plants.

Waylett pleaded guilty to producing cannabis, which carries a maximum 14-year sentence. His friend John Innis pleaded guilty to drug possession.

Judge Timothy Workman said the pair would be sentenced Tuesday.