In a week in which the Vatican made its peace with that dangerous consorter with witches Harry Potter, the Holy See has also revealed an unexpected soft spot for Oscar Wilde.

Earlier this week the Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, which had previously described JK Rowling's books as presenting a "vision of the world and the human being full of deep mistakes and dangerous suggestions", praised the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for making it clear that good must overcome evil "and that sometimes this requires costs and sacrifice".

Despite the Catholic Church's condemnation of practising homosexuality, the newspaper has now run a glowing review of a new book about the famously doomed lover of Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was "one of the personalities of the 19th century who most lucidly analysed the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects", wrote author Andrea Monda in a piece about Italian author Paolo Gulisano's The Portrait of Oscar Wilde.

In an article headlined "When Oscar Wilde met Pius IX", Monda wrote that Wilde was not "just a non-conformist who loved to shock the conservative society of Victorian England"; rather he was "a man who behind a mask of amorality asked himself what was just and what was mistaken, what was true and what was false".

"Wilde was a man of great, intense feelings, who behind the lightness of his writing, behind a mask of frivolity or cynicism, hid a deep knowledge of the mysterious value of life," he said.

The Holy See started its unlikely love affair with the Irish playwright and author two years ago when it published a collection of his quips in the book Provocations: Aphorisms for an Anti-conformist Christianity. Wilde's famous comments "I can resist everything except temptation", and "the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it" were included in the book, edited by Father Leonardo Sapienza.

Wilde was baptised into the Catholic Church shortly before he died. L'Osservatore Romano said that the "existential path" which the author trod "can also be seen as a long and difficult path toward that Promised Land which gives us the reason for existence, a path which led him to his conversion to Catholicism, a religion which, as he remarked in one of his more acute and paradoxical aphorisms, was 'for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do'."