Official Vatican paper loves new Wilde biography
Only a few days after making peace with Harry Potter, the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano ran a glowing review of a new book about the Victorian era’s most famous open homosexual. Wilde was “one of the personalities of the 19th century who most lucidly analyzed the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects,” wrote author Andrea Monda in a piece about Italian writer Paolo Gulisano’s The Portrait of Oscar Wilde. Wilde was baptized into the Catholic Church shortly before he died, and L’Osservatore Romano was happy to cite one of his quips on his conversion: Catholicism, Wilde claimed, was “for saints and sinners alone—for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.”