Fr Mark Patrick Hederman, OSB, abbot of Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick, described the series, in an interview with Sunday Sequence on BBC Ulster, as an antidote to the utilitarian mentality currently dominating the educational system.
He warned that this system of education is causing the destruction of children’s imaginative capacity.
"We are leaning from Harry Potter that imagination is the most important faculty in children,” he told the BBC programme, and added, “We have to change the idea that we have to educate all our children for economic growth.”
According to Fr Hederman, the current model of education leaves no time for the imagination.
“It is all memory,” he lamented, referring to the cramming for exams and the regurgitation of facts that secure good results.
He added, “We are lacking in that aspect of imagination when we are trying to educate our children. They are bored to tears by what we are doing and they are turned on by what she [JK Rowling] is doing.”
He urged the educational system to learn from JK Rowling, who has sold 450 million copies of her Harry Potter series, and which has been translated into 67 languages.
“They don’t have to do anything to release imagination in children; they just have to stop wiping imagination off the desktop of every child that is given this so-called free education from the age of four to eighteen.”
The current approach left children incapable of thinking outside the box he warned.
He rejected criticisms that have been levelled at him as a Catholic priest for his promotion of a series on wizards. Some believe he should instead be promoting the Bible.
“It is fundamentalists who are telling us this is wicked stuff,” he said, underling that the Rowling series, through its archetypes, magic, mystery and confrontation of the battle between good and evil, “prepares us for the extraordinary life and mystery that He [Jesus] came on earth to divulge.”
“There is no better introduction” to Jesus and the incarnation, the Benedictine writer said, and added that in origins, Harry is both English and Christian, but can be universally related to.
JK Rowling was “quite aware of the religious parallels in her books” he suggested as he compared them to the Narnia series of CS Lewis.
Fr Hederman, a self-confessed and avid Harry Potter fan, recently gave the keynote address at a conference entitled Magic is Might 2012 in the University of Limerick, which was the first ever Harry Potter academic conference to be held in Ireland.
In his speech, entitled Harry Potter: Archetype of the Child as our Future in the 21st Century, the abbot said many conservative Christian parents refuse to allow their children to read the stories because they claim the books promote witchcraft and wickedness.
And a pastor in New Mexico burned the books publicly as, "an abomination to God and to me;” while author Richard Abanes claimed there is a link between paganism and witchcraft, and the Potter books.
But Hederman said that as a Christian, he found the Harry Potter books give children an opening to the kind of mystery that Christianity embodies.
Fr Hederman said that, with 480 million copies of Potter books sold, “if we don’t take an interest in it, we don’t know what is going on.”
JK Rowling was, he declared, “doing work that all of us, especially those of us in education, would love to be doing, we would love to have the connection that she has with the youth of our country.”
Academics from as far away as Canada and South Africa delivered papers relating to popular culture and the Harry Potter series at the conference, which was organised by the University of Limerick’s Interaction Design Centre and Department of Sociology.