Arresto Momentum! Stop the ban on Harry Potter!

I’m not big on fantasy fiction, but I was completely taken with the Harry Potter series. I found them very entertaining and brilliantly imagined and detailed, and I loved how, as the characters got older, the plots became scarier and more complex. I admire J.K. Rowling’s backstory. I like that the books turned non-readers into readers. And were something that both adults and kids could enjoy together.

And now, a priest in Nashville – the Reverend Dan Reehil – is banning Harry Potter from his parish school.

Sounds like a Dementor move to me.

You know the Dementors, the prison guards in the flowing black cloaks, the “dark creatures that consume human happiness, creating an ambiance of coldness, darkness, misery and despair.” Guys with the “power to drain happiness and hope from humans”? Sounds about right.

Banning Harry Potter? Riddikulus!

Here’s the story:

"These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception," Rev. Reehil said of the seven-part "Harry Potter" book series.

"The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text," the email continues…

Reehil explains in the email that he has consulted several exorcists in the U.S. and Rome, and it was recommended that the school remove the books, The Tennessean reports. (Source: CBS News)

Oh, well, if a bunch of exorcists say so, of course you’ll want to keep these books out of the hands of the children at St. Edward’s Catholic School. Better they should read about St. Edward, son of King Ethelred the Unready and Queen Emma; patron saint of difficult marriages and the English royal family.

A prince among saints, a king among saints even, Edward may have had a reputation for ruthlessness, but he also cured a leper and offered the ring off his very finger to St. John, in disguise as a beggar. All this happened nearly one thousand years ago, so some of the deets may have gotten lost over the centuries, but didn’t St. John the Evangelist live a thousand years earlier than that? Must be some sort of magic. Good magic, of course.

Overall, the Catholic Church has not fatwa’d Harry Potter, but apparently each pastor has the “canonical authority” to do whatever he wants.

These poor kids!

I read voraciously as a child. Well-written, interesting series like The Little House and Betsy-Tacy-Tib, middling fare like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and out and out pre-teen dreck like Cherry Ames Student Nurse and Donna Parker on her Own. I devoured the American Heritage history books, and sucked up the utter pap of the lives of the saints books that were part of the Vision Books series. My family subscribed to both the history books and the live of saints.

The maximum number of books you could take out of the public library was six, and each Friday night, my father took us to the Main South Branch of the Worcester Public Library (where our cousin Ann worked while she was in high school) and everyone checked out their six book allotment. Other than my father. He brought my mother’s card along, so he could check out twelve books – mostly mysteries and histories – and he and my mother could trade off. Our family belonged to both adult and children’s book clubs and magazines, so there’d always be something to read around the house.

Everyone in my family read. Even if the TV was on – and my parents weren’t particularly big TV watchers, although us kids were – you had a book in your lap.

By junior high, you could check books out of the adult section of the library, and the world opened up to my becoming a normal reader.

I read books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Caine Mutiny, and something called The Hills Were Liars, a future-dystopic novel about the survival of the Catholic Church post global nuclear crisis. I remember being quite taken with this book, but I don’t know anyone else who’s ever read it.

By high school I was a serious reader, and although I devote entirely too much time these days to Twitter, I still am. Serious reading now includes plenty of crime and mystery novels. I am, after all, my parents’ daughter.

Other than avoiding certain genres – like fantasy, sci-fi, and romance - I don’t censor my reading. If I start something and I don’t like it, I put it aside.

The one attempt at censoring in high school that I recall was when Sister Josephine, my freshman homeroom teacher, warned us not to get seduced into reading T.C.O.T.R., which, she told us, was R.O.T.T.E.N.

Although she’d goofed up on the initials – it’s I not O – it took us about a nano-second to realize she was talking about The Catcher in the Rye. I suspect that anyone with an older sibling went home that night, borrowed their copy, and took immediately to bed with book and flashlight. I know that I did.

Censoring Harry Potter? Hiss, boo.

If I could invoke the Wingardium Leviosa curse, I’d levitate a copy of volume one, and hit Reverend Reehil over the head with it. (Lightly, of course.)

Doesn’t he have better things to do?

I mean, far be it from me to suggest that a Catholic priest might better spend his time helping the poor, visiting the sick, or performing all the other works of mercy than banning books.

I say to the kids of St. Edward’s, Expecto Patronum! Find someone who can take this dude on.

Expelliarmus!