The fact that Catholic bishops ordered a favourable Golden Compass review off of their web site shows that someone in the US RCC is definitely "asleep at the switch" concerning this whole business.
Having been covering this since early November (the original review, the follow-up and a comment on the whole business of the "magisterium,") it’s obvious that Philip Pullman is a definite anti-theist with a special animus towards Roman Catholicism. Although this site has been criticised for making an issue out of this for a work of fiction, with fiction what’s inside will come out one way or another.
There are obviously some "reappraisers" (to use Kendall Harmon’s lovely term) in the bowels of the RCC bureaucracy, but another part of the problem is in the Catholic intellectual system. It’s still Christianity’s best, but its overemphasis on natural law leads Catholics to look for moral goodness and correspondence to Christian values in places where it either doesn’t exist or exists in an alien context. Catholics, like their Protestant counterparts, have put the uplifting of morality high on their agenda, but they’d better put more emphasis on basic theology and doctrine rather than some "morality" based on "natural law" whose goalposts are all too easily moved.
Positive Infinity 