With “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” to be released at midnight tomorrow, the mania among fans of the youthful wizard has reached a fever pitch in New York. Anticipation seems to be significantly less at the Vatican, as reports have emerged that the recently elected Pope Benedict XVI does not share the appreciation millions of his flock have for J.K. Rowling’s fantasy fiction.

According to signed letters scanned and published on LifeSiteNews.com, a family-oriented news portal on the Internet, Benedict wrote to a personal correspondent: “It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”

The letter was written in 2003, when Benedict was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Catholic church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. According to the report on LifeSiteNews.com, the cardinal was responding, in German, to a woman, Gabriele Kuby, who had sent him a copy of her book “Harry Potter – gut oder bose?” (“Harry Potter – Good or Evil?”). In it she argued that the Harry Potter books have a corrupting influence on children and retard their spiritual development.

Ms. Kuby is among a substantial number of religious critics who have said the Potter series, owing to its focus on witches, wizards, and other pagan elements, turns children away from a proper spiritual upbringing and exerts a harmful influence on impressionable minds.

It does not appear that New York Catholics, however, will be forced to choose between broomsticks and Benedict. There is no indication that the pontiff’s missive was meant in any sort of official capacity regarding his position as church guardian of doctrine, nor has he issued any statement on the Rowling books since ascending to the papacy.

A spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, Joseph Zwilling, said: “The archdiocese hasn’t taken an official position on the Harry Potter books.” He said no one at the archdiocese had read the works with a critical eye to determine the literary or spiritual merits of Ms. Rowling’s novels.

Similarly reassuring for Catholic “Potter” fans was the skepticism expressed by a spokeswoman for the New York-based Catholic League, Kiera McCaffrey. The Catholic League, an influential laypersons’ organization of national reach, boasts 350,000 members.

“At this point, it’s not exactly clear what then-Cardinal Ratzinger thinks of the books,” Ms. McCaffrey said, explaining that the letter to Ms. Kuby might have been simply an expression of appreciation for calling attention to the question of whether “Harry Potter” was a corrupting influence.

Someone who has looked into the role of fantasy in children’s spiritual development is a Catholic professor of literature at York College at the City University of New York, James Como, who is also a self-described fan of both Harry Potter and Pope Benedict.

“On the surface, I can see how people, Christians especially, might have reservations,” Mr. Como said of the Rowling books. “There are all these words and characters that have been associated with the occult in the past – witches and wizards have not, for the most part, been good things.”

“But once you read the books,” Mr. Como said, “you realize that Rowling is on the side of the angels.”

Mr. Como, an expert on an author of fantasy much beloved among Christians, C.S. Lewis, said such books, which indicate to children that there is a world, often a spiritual one, beyond the realm of the here-and-now – books that draw children outside of themselves and thus make them less self-absorbed – can play an important role in religious development.

Still, he cautioned, it is important that youthful readers benefit from parental guidance when approaching complex works. “I certainly wouldn’t let even a bright 10-year-old work his or her way through the Bible alone without guidance,” Mr. Como said.

“You need some authoritative magisterium,” he added, explaining that having authorities help in interpreting spiritual texts was characteristic of Catholic Christianity, and perhaps what Benedict was getting at in his letter.

While such assurances might calm Catholic New Yorkers, some die-hard “Harry Potter” fans bristled at Benedict’s literary criticism.

The owner of the Chelsea bookstore Books of Wonder, Peter Glassman, was one of them.

“As Gore Vidal says, the problem with the people that burn books is that they never read them,” Mr. Glassman, 45, said of the pontiff’s remarks, which he labeled “outrageous.”

“For any religious leader to condemn them, considering all the wonderful good the books have done for children, seems to be a crime,” Mr. Glassman said of the Potter series.

Mr. Glassman, whose store is holding a Harry Potter party tomorrow that is expected to draw 2,000 guests, describes himself as “friendly” with Ms. Rowling.