Christmas has come early for Chris Weitz, director of The Golden Compass, the film version of the first novel in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. Roman Catholic groups in the US are calling for a boycott of the film. Bill Donoghue, the president of the Catholic League, has said that he fears the film may cause children to read the books, which “promote atheism for kids”.

And if Mr Weitz is really lucky, Santa may deliver what every director prays for, if pray they do: a condemnation from the Vatican. Elizabeth, the atrocious costume drama starring the luminous Cate Blanchett, could have sunk into deserved obscurity had it not been for an obliging Vatican official who described it as “an antipapal travesty”. As one seasoned hack observed, those are words you get on far too few actors’ blogs these days.

It must be tough being a Vatican frontman. On the one hand, you know that the movie version of Catholicism being peddled by most contemporary film-makers, from The Da Vinci Code to The Golden Compass, is almost certainly a lurid cocktail of old-style Protestant cliché and a very modern willingness to shock religious sensibilities – apart from Islamic ones, obviously. On the other, you are conscious that the epithet “controversial” is what every film distributor longs for.

Dorothy Parker identified the phenomenon back in the Thirties in a review of the supposedly risqué French play, Aphrodite. The Mayor of New York, she wrote, “did more for the box office receipts in a single day than the combined efforts of the most talented press agents could have accomplished in a year. The Mayor had but to say that he had heard a rumour that there were scandalous goings-on at the Century Theatre . . . and the house sold out for eight weeks in advance.”

So what’s the solution? Lofty disdain is one option. It’s hard though, given a really gross travesty of all you hold dear. I sat through a performance of Jerry Springer – The Opera, next to a couple of men who plainly thought they were being exquisitely daring by chuckling at the depiction of Christ as a nappy-wearing coprophiliac. By the end, they were applauding their own broadmindedness quite as much as the play. My reaction to their reaction was to want to poke them in the eye.

The really cool approach, I think, is that of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He took part in a dialogue with Pullman on the subject of his trilogy at the National Theatre in which he made it clear how much he enjoyed the novels. It was impossible to sustain the fiction that Christianity is a sinister conspiracy against liberty and reason in the face of Dr Williams’s genial desire for a civilised conversation. An imprimatur from the Archbishop of Canterbury for The Golden Compass, however, is precisely what its makers would want least.

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