I think we’d all like to believe that, sitting next to a reading lamp and swaddled in his Holy Snuggie somewhere deep inside the Vatican’s intestinal labyrinths, Pope Benedict Palpatine Vader XVI read The Casual Vacancy with a mounting sense of disappointment that Harry Potter didn’t make at least a cameo appearance. Really, though, who’s to know what the Pope really thought of J.K. Rowling’s adult fiction effort?

All we know for sure is that the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano fucking haaated Rowling’s latest novel, observing that, although Rowling “has all the qualifications to be the worthy successor of Grace Metaloius,” there’s simply “something missing” in The Casual Vacancy. Get it?? It’s a big-tim Catholic burn.

The negative review probably had something to do with all the book’s sex, swearing, and drug use, although, to be fair, the paper’s resident movie critic really liked Skyfall, so unless the new James Bond movie is actually a Care Bears movie, there’s probably a little more substance to L’Osservatore Romano’s critique. Like, there was zero Harry Potter in The Casual Vacancy. Vatican slams J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy [Telegraph]

-Doug Barry

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