Vatican blasts "Golden Compass", reveals shoddy agenda in poorly-written editorial.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican on Wednesday condemned the film "The Golden Compass," which some have called anti-Christian, saying it promotes a cold and hopeless world without God.

In a long editorial, the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, also slammed Philip Pullman, the bestselling author of the book on which the family fantasy movie is based.

It was the Vatican's most stinging broadside against an author and a film since it roundly condemned "The Da Vinci Code" in 2005 and 2006.

"In Pullman's world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events." the editorial said.

Catholic groups in the United States have called for a boycott, fearing even a diluted version of the book might draw people to read the bestselling trilogy. The Vatican newspaper said the film and Pullman's writings showed that "when man tries to eliminate God from his horizon, everything is reduced, made sad, cold and inhumane".

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Damn, that editorial was so poorly-written that they revealed their whole shabby secret in one bad paragraph. Of course, Christianity- and all other magic-worshipping dress-up cults, has always been against individuals being able to control the situations and events surrounding their lives. An independent, free-thinking person who does not bend his knee to an immaterial non-existent fabrication with whom they cannot communicate directly is not an easy person to dominate and manipulate.

The Vatican calls it 'chilling' and 'hopeless' because it is hopeless for them. Anything that even remotely postulates the empowerment of an individual, his earthly salvation, without buying into their mystical snake oil, is indeed a hopeless vision of the world for them, cold and sad, because they aren't on the driver's seat, telling everybody what they should do. There is a lot more of the Magisterium in the Catholic Church (and religion) than they are willing to admit.