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Vatican newspaper kisses and makes up 109 years after playwright converted to Catholicism
'Somewhat scandalous'
Pope: Oscar Wilde not so bad after all
L'Osservatore Romano (circulation 12,000), the Holy See's official newspaper, has made an astonishing act of reconciliation with Oscar Wilde by praising him as a "lucid analyst of the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects," and a profound thinker who devoted his life to questioning "what was true and what was false".
In its review of a new book on Wilde by an Italian author, L'Osservatore has continued the thawing out of relations between the Vatican and Wilde's memory begun two years ago when its head of protocol, Leonardo Sapienza, collated a book of witticisms for Christians which included some of the playwright's best gags. Father Sapienza said that his "razor-sharp maxims" carried important moral messages, although he lived "somewhat scandalously".
After 109 years of regarding Wilde, who was received into the Catholic church on his deathbed, as a dangerous pervert and debauched nonconformist, the praise from the Pope's house organ (which also declared that he was more than "an aesthete and lover of the ephemeral") has been widely recognised as a sign that the Vatican has at last come to terms with his life and his legacy.
