It wasn't so much a papal bull that was issued by the Vatican recently as a papal bear, and a teddy bear at that. In the week that "Pokemon: The First Movie" opened in Italy, an announcement on the Vatican's satellite television station reassured Italian children -- or their parents, since the children had never shown any signs of being worried about it -- that Pokemon is "full of inventive imagination" and celebrates "ties of intense friendship." What is more, said the Vatican, the trading-card and computer-game versions of the frantically popular Japanese game (it didn't mention the TV show or the movie) has no "harmful moral side effects."

That's a relief, then. We wouldn't want to hold Pikachu and Jigglypuff and all the other cute little monsters responsible for such old-fashioned moral failings as greed, envy, cheating and anger, which have been associated with the worldwide Pokemon phenomenon in the form of . . . let's see . . . price gouging by sellers, relentless harassment of parents by pint-size purchasers, schoolyard brawls and even violent physical assaults, to name just a few. And to think that we had been under the impression that these were side effects.

We also stand corrected about the original point of Pokemon. What? You thought that the main job of those "trainers" was to instruct their cuddly charges in the art of whopping the stuffing out of other animated Beanie Babies with such God-given supernatural skills as the ability to squirt water, deliver an electrical charge or strangle one's enemy with vines? You erred. As any up-to-the-minute theologian could tell you, this is a shortsighted, earthbound, even childish, view. Pokemon is about the filial friendship that sustains soldiers in the trenches. It is about the intense ties that bind one miniature, neon-bright samurai to another as they go forth to do battle against evil. It is about love.