Has Harry Potter been rehabilitated by the Vatican? In 2003 Cardinal Ratzinger condemned J. K. Rowling’s novels as a “subtle seduction” that undermined “the soul of Christianity”. However, the praise heaped upon the new film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has encouraged hopes that Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, may be a candidate for conversion.

It was always surprising that of all the doubtful modern influences on the young, it was that essentially decent Potter chap who got singled out for priestly censure. Yet more peculiar, perhaps, was the identity of the 20th-century British novelist who caused the most anxious soul-searching in the corridors of the Vatican.

As a celebrated convert to Catholicism, Graham Greene was a writer the Church might have cherished. But his 1940 novel The Power and the Glory featured a priest who — despite ultimately sacrificing himself for his religion — had rather fallen from grace in his private life. In 1953 the novel was investigated by the Holy Office, the Vatican body charged with censuring error and updating the Index of Forbidden Books. The Holy Office’s functionaries condemned Greene’s “paradoxical modes of thought” and an “abnormal propensity toward . . . situations in which one kind of sexual immorality or another plays a role”.

The verdict that “literature of this kind does harm to the cause of the true religion” was tempered only by the recognition that openly suppressing it might prove counterproductive.

Instead, Cardinal Griffin of Westminster was told to talk privately to Greene, telling him it was his duty to prevent his novel being republished unless he first cut out the bits to which the Church took exception. By informing Griffin that, alas, he could not comply because the copyright rested with his publisher, Greene managed to retain both his intellectual integrity and his spiritual obedience.

Griffin, however, published a pastoral letter, not naming Greene, but condemning those Catholic novelists whose “unrestrained portrayal of immoral conduct prove a source of temptation to many of their readers. Though it may well be that such literature can be read in safety by the select few, so great is the danger to the virtue of the majority that its general publication is most undesirable.”

This was an early version of Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s celebrated prosecuting question in the Lady Chatterley case: “Is it a book you would ever wish your wife or servant to read?”

Ultimately, though, Greene appealed to a higher authority. In 1965 he raised the subject of his censure with Pope Paul VI. The Pope gave a worldly sigh and replied, “Mr Greene, some parts of your book are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.”

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