A number of outlets have reported on an enthusiastic article about Oscar Wilde that appeared last week in the official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

The piece is consistent with increased coverage of secular culture under L’Osservatore‘s current editor Giovanni Maria Vian.

But it really shouldn’t seem incongruous to find the “sublime Oscar,” as my former professor Harold Bloom habitually calls him, lauded in the pope’s newspaper.

Wilde, after all, converted to Catholicism at the end of his life, and the church likes nothing better than stories about transgressors (Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, etc.) who eventually came around to its point of view.

Of course, as our friend Jim Martin puts it, “Beatification is, shall we say, far off.”