GC blog 3

By now you may have seen what I've been talking about in the news, magazines, papers, and online. I always love it when I can say, "I told ya so!" Christians of all types are worried about the watered-down film's sneaky way of getting parents to buy their kids the not-at-all-watered-down books. Like with The DaVinci Code, Catholics, being the target of the book/film, are on the forefront of the battle, but many other denominations have come out with papers, brochures, and websites against Pullman and these books. Here is more info. from the Catholic League document, picking up where we left off. Please comment with your reactions to my postings.

Book Synopsis and Excerpts

In the fictional universe of His Dark Materials, there is no real God; rather there is a high angel called the Authority, who purports to be God. The Church does the bidding of the Authority, repressing physical pleasure and subverting the will and wisdom of the people. Lyra, the protagonist, is a second Eve who will allow mankind to be knowledgeable and free through her Fall.

The Golden Compass
In Lyra's world, the Church (Magisterium) is a Calvinized version of the Catholic Church. The power it wields is explained early on: "Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church's power over every aspect of life had been absolute. The Papacy itself had been abolished after Calvin's death, and a tangle of courts, colleges, and councils, collectively known as the Magisterium, had grown up in its place."
Lyra, an orphan (we think), lives at a school and notices children disappearing, which ends up being due to a division of the Magisterium called the General Oblation Board. It is headed by Mrs. Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman's character and one we find out to be Lyra's mother).
The group is explained: "Very old idea, as a matter of fact. In the Middle Ages, parents would give their children to the church to be monks or nuns. And the unfortunate brats were known as oblates. Means a sacrifice, an offering up, something of that sort. So the same idea was taken up when they were looking into the Dust business." The "Dust" drives the plot, and is a source of strife between Church authorities (the bad guys) who see the invisible substance as original sin and want to suppress it, and those scientists and rebels (good guys) who want to promote it.
The Church kidnaps kids since the Dust isn't as attracted to them as adults. They perform vile experiments on them, the cruelest being severing the child's soul ("demon") which lives outside the body in animal form.
With the Golden Compass, Lyra is able to elude Mrs. Coulter and other agents of the Church and free the children.
Lord Asriel, leader of the 'good guys' (who is Lyra's father), has discovered that severing a child's demon releases enough energy to actually create a break between worlds. he chooses a victim recently freed form the Church and destroys the boy, opening a doorway into a parallel universe.
Some quotes in the book: "The Church in recent times, Lyra, its' been getting more commanding. There's councils for this and councils for that; there's talk of reviving the Office of the Inquisition, God forbid."
"He's pushed his heretical investigations to the point where it's positively dangerous to let him live. At any rate, it seems that the Vatican Council has begun to debate the question of the sentence of death, and the probability is that it'll be carried out." (Any doubts it's anti-Catholic?)
I can't believe this is in a "children's" book--"There was a precedent. Something had happened like it before. Do you know what the word castration means? It means removing the sexual organs of a boy so that he never develops the characteristics of a man. A castrato keeps his high treble voice all his life, which is why the Church allowed it: so useful in Church music."
"This will mean the end of the Church [...] the end of all those centuries of darkness!"

I'll continue my next blog with the 2nd book, The Subtle Knife. (Aptly titled, don't you think?)

Blessings,
Stephen