“Vatican Condemns Twilight”? Yes and No.

I’ve been getting email asking for a response to the supposed condemnation of the Twilight Saga, books, movie, and author, by the Roman Catholic Church. Let’s take a look at a few of these news stories, why Catholics might find the series both morally dissipating and offensive, and then reflect on the probability of these reports being true and what it will mean regardless of their veracity. Here is the CNN bulletin from last Friday:

‘New Moon’ sets midnight showing record
November 20, 2009 4:16 p.m. EST

(CNN) — The second installment in the “Twilight” saga, starring Robert Pattinson as vampire Edward Cullen, Kristen Stewart as his star-crossed love and Taylor Lautner as the wolfboy who loves her, has already ripped through a box office record.

According to Hollywood trade magazine Variety, “New Moon” is the biggest midnight showing in history, grossing $26.3 million when it opened in 3,514 theaters at 12:01 a.m. Friday…..

But along with the ticket sales bounty is backlash.

The Vatican released an announcement Friday denouncing the film, which is based on Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster series.

“This film is nothing more than a moral vacuum with a deviant message and as such should be of concern,” warns the Vatican’s culture council leader, Monsignor Franco Perazzolo, in a statement timed to the release of “New Moon,” according to E! Online.

“This theme of vampires in ‘Twilight’ combines a mixture of excesses,” he continued, “that, as ever, is aimed at young people and gives a heavy esoteric element.”

Catholic News USA, citing a story in England’s Daily Mall, has more on this theme.

New Moon has ‘deviant message’: Vatican

The Pontifical Council for Culture has expressed concerns over the growing popularity of the Twilight vampire series, and called its newest film a “moral vacuum with a deviant message”.

The second in the series, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, hit cinemas worldwide on Friday Nov. 20

“This film is nothing more than a moral vacuum with a deviant message and as such should be of concern,” said Monsignor Franco Perazzolo of the Pontifical Council of Culture.

He condemned the film for its occult imagery and described those elements as a “moral void more dangerous than any deviant message.”

“The theme of vampires in Twilight combines a mixture of excesses that as ever is aimed at young people and gives a heavy esoteric element. It is once again that age-old trick or ideal formula of using extremes to make an impact at the box office, reported imdb.com.

Vatican officials previously criticised the Harry Potter film franchise for its themes of magic and wizardry, as well as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons for their depiction of the Catholic Church.

Twilight, based on books by U.S. author Stephanie Meyer, tells the story of a romance between vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart)

ChristianToday.com puts this in the context of Vatican concerns about Halloween:

“This film is nothing more than a moral vacuum with a deviant message and as such, is something, that should be of concern,” he said.

Last month, the Vatican warned parents that Halloween was had an “undercurrent of occultism” and was “absolutely anti-Christian”.

The Vatican advised parents instead to “direct the meaning of the feast [All Saints Day which follows All Hallows Eve] towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death”.

I have three quick points about these headlines and articles beyond my reflex “haven’t we been here before?”:

(1) The Pontifical Council of Culture (PCOC or “peacock”) is not “the Vatican” or “the Pope.” Though no doubt the Lidless Wonders in Catholic Star Chambers will read this as an ex cathedra pronouncement from Pope Benedict XVI, it is the statement of a department within the Vatican which statement has no weight greater than that of a pastoral note. It is not a matter of obedience for pious Catholics to burn their copies of the Twilight series or to test the faith credentials of their neighbors via a Cullen-sensitive litmus strip. Reading the purpose and aims of PCOC from their website, we learn:

The Pontifical Council for Culture is that department (Dicastery) of the Roman Curia which assists the Pontiff in the exercise of his supreme pastoral office for the benefit and service of the universal Church and of particular Churches concerning the encounter between the saving message of the Gospel and cultures, in the study of the weighty phenomena of: the rift between the Gospel and cultures; indifference in matters of religion; unbelief. It is also concerned with relationships between the Church and the Holy See and the world of culture; in particular it promotes dialogue with contemporary cultures, so that human civilisation may become increasingly open to the Gospel, and so that men and women of science, letters and the arts may know that the Church acknowledges their work as a service to truth, goodness and beauty.

I think the relevant section here is in “indifference to matters of religion” and “unbelief.” The Council has decided to make a note, in keeping with its anti-occult homily from All Hallows Eve,that Twilight’s “moral vacuum” and “excessive esoterism” foster religious indifference and unbelief. None of the 12 tasks with which the Council was charged at its founding, however, give it teaching authority or its directions authority requiring more than reflection.

Sadly, this distinction is lost on media headline writers (and even Catholic readers, perhaps especially Catholic readers) so I have to expect that once again there will be faithful Christians who believe that Twilight has been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Roman Pontiff.

(2) Having said that, Twilight’s being smacked down by PCOC is no small thing. It reflects concern among many traditional Catholics about the occult and about the never-ending culture war between believers and the godless, in which war both sides imagine themselves as hopelessly out numbered and fighting against the hordes of Sauron to save Gondor and the West. PCOC is making a point about Twilight that other Catholics have made, perhaps because other Catholics have made them and asked for a PCOC “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” view on these books. (PCOC has previously given an informal “thumbs up” to Harry Potter and several “thumbs down” notes about the anti-Papism of Dan Brown’s novels.)

Steven Greydanus, a notable film critic and Roman Catholic, surveyed the field of Catholic opinion online about Twilight and found the “more nuanced” voices had serious objections. He noted one site devoted to exposing the dangers of Twilight, Spes Unica, and a host of bloggers, to include Potter apologist Nancy Brown and Jessica Thornton, who don’t care for the series.

Mr. Greydanus also notes, however, that there are serious Catholics who think the books are not evil and even more than just all right. He cites the enthusiastic comments of Kate Bryan at her True Rebellion weBlog and Jill Stanek. The latter in a recent post wrote:

To skirt on the edge of blasphemy, with vampirism aside, I think Edward represents the yearning in every woman’s heart for the knight in shining armor that is only satisfied in the person of Jesus.

Mr. Greydanus concluded another post on this subject with a similar pointer to Edward Cullen as a Christ figure:

I wonder whether somewhere in the cult of Edward Cullen there isn’t a symptom of a larger cultural crisis of masculinity as well. Does Edward somehow offer women something that real men have lost or forgotten?

What if more husbands were more Christlike toward their wives? What if conscientious and loving fathers brought up their sons to treat women with honor and dignity, and their daughters to respect themselves and to expect the same from others?

In such a world, I suspect the allure of a tortured vampire lover wouldn’t glitter half so brightly.

Despite these notes, though, the Spes Unica blindness to metaphor and symbolism (that is, to allegorical and anagogical meaning) and attentiveness to the appearance of indifference to moral standards in the books seems to have won out, at least in the PCOC statement. Twilight gets a “thumbs down” along with The Da Vinci Code. It isn’t a blanket condemnation requiring obedience but it is a pastoral note for the serious reflection of Catholics offered by a Vatican office. Faithful Catholics, however, may disagree — as they have — without violating the tenets and teachings of the Magisterium.

(3) I am obliged to note, too, there is some substance to Vatican objections to Twilight, albeit less on the grounds of esoterism and occult notes in the series than on Da Vinci-esque anti-Papism that is implicit to the drawing of the Volturi bad guys as Vatican transparencies. I’ve written about this recently here and here and those who have seen the movie version of New Moon have written (see this and that) to say that the film makers have highlighted the Vatican-Volturi story echoes rather than downplayed them.

Mrs. Meyer is a Latter-day Saint, and, though I doubt very much that she bears any ill-will or conscious prejudice against Catholics, the founders of her faith were profoundly and openly hostile to what they called the “Whore of Babylon” and this seems to have bled into her imaginative work. Not as grossly and as up-front as Dan Brown’s misrepresentation of Opus Dei and Christian tradition about Jesus of Nazareth, but sufficiently blatant that it is very hard not to see it.

My conclusion? The statement of PCOC on Twilight reflects a culture war tunnel vision implicit to their charter. They missed the boat on the book’s edifying content which is the heart of its meaning and the cause of these novels being as popular as they are. Millions of people are reading them — to include pious and faith-focused Catholics — and they aren’t enjoying them because they push a “moral vacuum” or urge readers to adopt an “esoteric” or even Masonic to LDS world view. They are reading and loving them because of their soul-heartening message of sacrificial love and divinization possible in Christ.

In that respect, the PCOC announcement was unfortunate. The effects, if like the backwash of the faux “Pope Condemns Harry Potter” controversy in 2005, will be to create another faith litmus strip that will divide parishes needlessly (”I can’t believe she lets her children read those books. Doesn’t she know what the Vatican said about them?”) and only advances the idea among non-believers that Christians are addle-headed morons making mountain meadows out of molehills.

The Mormon content is and is not problematic, I think, if when it shows itself as painfully and obviously as it does in the Volturi slap at Catholicism, it needs to be noted (and scoffed at). Esoteric Christianity itself isn’t evil or unusual in literature; it is the heart of the English fantasy tradition via the Inklings, the natural theology of Coleridge, and the Cambridge Platonists. Esoteric teaching in fiction, though, that we get through Joseph Smith, Jr., and his Apostles is a relatively mixed bag.

The source of the Inkling and Mormon hermetic ideas in sixteenth and seventeenth century Radical Reformation is a point in common but clearly the end points are radically divergent. At one end, we get Joanne Rowling and the “left bank” of the Inkling stream that is implicitly Christian and edifying, fiction which is hard to understand outside an orthodox Christian conception, albeit less devotional than metaphysical, of the human person and the world. On the other end, we get wing-nut heterodoxy with either very light shades of conventional Christianity or a fervent anti-church agenda a la Dan Brown.

Mormonism per se drifts more toward the Dan Brown side of things than to the traditional Christian esoteric fare (if you doubt that, check out the LDS efforts to capture some of the interest in Dan Brown in their missionary work). I suspect this leaning is what the PCOC and other Catholic critics are picking up in their reading of Twilight. What is unfortunate is that they miss how much more Mrs. Meyer draws on English literary traditions in her work than on her religious beliefs, traditions such as Shakespearean literary alchemy and Brontean Gothic romance, that her relatively hermetic faith probably allowed her to understand in her reading and use in her work.

Your comments and correction are, as always, coveted.