Irish playwright, poet and novelist Oscar Wilde has been praised by the Vatican's official newspaper as a man who was looking for God. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

First it was Harry Potter, and now the Vatican is attempting a reconciliation with Oscar Wilde.

The late Irish playwright and famous wit was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church shortly before he died, but until recently had been considered something of a degenerate by church officials.

This week, the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano praised Wilde in an article about Italian author Paolo Gulisano's biography The Portrait of Oscar Wilde.

In the article, writer Andrea Monda called Wilde "one of the personalities of the 19th century who most lucidly analyzed the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects."

Monda noted the Irish writer's audience with Pope Pius IX in 1877 and acknowledged Wilde's conversion to Catholicism.

"Oscar Wilde was a man constantly looking for the beautiful and the good, but also for a God that he never challenged, respected and who he fully embraced after his dramatic experience of jail, concluding with his communion in the Catholic Church," Monda wrote.

In 1895, Wilde was jailed for two years in Britain for gross indecency after having an affair with a younger man. After his release, he spent his last three years penniless before dying in 1900.

The writer of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray had few supporters in prim Victorian Britain.

'Intense feelings'

Monda wrote that he was not "just a non-conformist who loved to shock the conservative society of Victorian England."

"Wilde was a man of great, intense feelings, who behind the lightness of his writing, behind a mask of frivolity or cynicism, hid a deep knowledge of the mysterious value of life," he said.

The L'Osservatore Romano article is not the only indication that the church is ready to embrace Wilde as one of its own.

Two years ago some of Wilde's witty sayings were included in a book of moral quips for Christians created by the Vatican's head of protocol, Leonardo Sapienza.

Last week, the same newspaper published a review of the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that praised the film despite its references to witchcraft.