There’s no denying the phenomenally successful Harry Potter books (“There’s Something about Harry,” July/August 2001) are having a pernicious influence on the publishing world. This summer the New York Times reported that the estate of C. S. Lewis and its publishers are crafting a marketing makeover of Narnia and its denizens to “expand readership and extend the brand”—in essence, to keep up with Harry.
Mixing fantasy with Christian allegory and imagery, The Chronicles of Narnia have sold more than sixty-five million copies in more than thirty languages. Lewis’s seven-volume saga is the work most often cited by Christian opponents of J. K. Rowling’s recent Potter books, whose protagonist is a boy wizard, as the proper way to mix children’s literature and magic.
Now the Lewis estate and the series publisher, HarperCollins, are creating new Narnia novels and licensing plush Narnian toys. The Times reported that “they have developed a strategy to avoid direct links to the Christian imagery and theology that suffused the Narnian novels.”
Carol Dean Hatcher, the producer of a public TV documentary about Lewis’s life, had negotiated contracts with HarperCollins to publish a companion book and help underwrite the project. The deal fell through, according to Hatcher, amid pressures from the publisher and the estate to eliminate references in the script to Christian imagery in the Narnia series. She released an internal HarperCollins memo in which a company executive wrote, “We’ll need to be able to give emphatic assurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories with Christian imagery/theology.”
“I was appalled,” Hatcher told the Times. “It is astounding to minimize that part of this; it’s like doing a video biography of Hank Aaron and refusing to acknowledge he was a baseball player.”
With Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham as an adviser, the Lewis estate has generally rejected requests to create Narnian sequels or spinoffs. That policy shifted when Simon Adley took over as managing director of the C. S. Lewis Company. Adley is a former marketing director at Scholastic, which publishes the Harry Potter books in the U.S. In the last two years, as the Harry craze peaked, sales of the Narnia books spiked twenty percent.
“What is wrong with trying to get people outside of Christianity to read the Narnian chronicles?” Gresham wrote earlier this year in an Internet forum for Lewis fans. “The Christian audience is less in need of Narnia than the secular audience, and in today’s world the surest way to prevent secularists and their children from reading it is to keep it in the Christian or religious section of the bookstores or to firmly link Narnia with modern evangelical Christianity.”
But John G. West, co-editor of The C. S. Lewis Readers Encyclopedia, voiced what seems to be the consensus opinion of Narnia aficionados: “What they’ve figured out is that Harry Potter is a cash cow. And here’s a way they can decompartmentalize the children’s novels from the rest of Lewis. That’s what’s so troubling: Narnia is a personal creation, and they’re turning it into a corporate creation.”
— Tim Ryland
And No Room for Career Advancement
Just for the record: John Paul II does not receive a salary.
On July 13, when the Vatican’s financial statement was presented, an American reporter asked Cardinal Sergio Sebastiani, president of the prefecture for the economic affairs of the Holy See, how much the Pope earns. Cardinal Sebastiani answered that, although he was unaware of a papal salary, he believed that, if it existed, it would be “normal.”
The next day, Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls published a press statement that said “the Pope has not received, and has never received, a salary.”
“Appropriate Vatican organizations provide for the needs of the Holy Father’s daily activity,” the statement added. Navarro-Valls said that “all donations received by the Pope are allocated to the needs of the Church, respecting the intention of the donor, when stipulated. The donations are managed according to absolutely transparent criteria.”
— Brian Kelleher
Pray for France
The highest French court of appeal ruled in July that disabled children are entitled to compensation if their mothers were not given the chance to abort them, Agence France-Presse reported. The ruling follows a case brought by three families with physically deformed children. The parents argued that if doctors had detected their unborn children’s disabilities they would have aborted them.
Physicians, activists for the disabled, and pro-life groups have described the decision by the Cour de Cassation as an incentive toward eugenics, news reports said. The ruling upheld a landmark decision in 2000 that awarded a mentally retarded boy damages because he had not been aborted. The case was widely described as establishing in law a disabled child’s “right not to be born.”
“This is a real act of phobia,” said a news release from the Collective to Stop Discrimination against the Disabled. “Now parents are going to be attacked and seen as irresponsible because they gave birth to a handicapped child.”
Doctors say the fear of being sued for a misdiagnosis would encourage them to recommend abortions at the slightest hint of a disability. “The ruling means that the handicapped have no place in our society,” said Yves Richard, a lawyer representing the medical profession.
— Dan Trimly
Voice in the Wilderness
Two days before the French court decision reported above, John Paul II warned in an address that the modern world’s denial of the incarnation of Christ “in turn leads to a greatly diminished sense of human possibility.”
The present era, he said, is one in which “the Incarnation is denied in many practical ways, and the consequences of this denial are clear and disturbing. In the first place the individual’s relationship with God is seen as purely personal and private, so that God is removed from the processes that govern social, political, and economic activity.
“This in turn leads to a greatly diminished sense of human possibility, given that it is only Christ who fully reveals the wonderful possibilities of human life, who really reveals man to himself.” the Pope said. “When Christ is excluded or denied, our vision of human purpose dwindles; and as we anticipate and aim for less, hope gives way to despair, joy to depression. . . . Life is not valued and loved, hence the advance of a certain culture of death, with its dark blooms of abortion and euthanasia.”
— Tim Ryland