LONDON (RNS) A top Roman Catholic cleric in England has accused Disney of corrupting children, encouraging greed and turning its make-believe world into a latter-day pilgrimage site.

Christopher Jamison, the abbot of Worth Abbey, in southern England, charges Disney with “exploiting spirituality” and helping to generate a culture of materialism while pretending to provide movie, book and theme park stories with a moral message.

Jamison, the star of a British Broadcasting Corp. television series, “The Monastery,” and a candidate to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor as leader of the Catholic population of England and Wales, lodged the accusations in his new book, “Finding Happiness.”

In it, he cites Disney films such as “Sleeping Beauty” and “101 Dalmatians” as examples of products the corporation uses to entice children to buy its products if they want to see themselves as part of “a good and happy family.”

According to the cleric, “the message behind every movie and book, behind every theme park and T-shirt, is that our children’s world needs Disney.”

This, he said, “is basically the commercial exploitation of spirituality.”

The message is, Jamison added, “they will be happier if they live the full Disney experience, and thousands of families around the world buy into this deeper message as they flock to Disneyland.”

“This is the new pilgrimage that children desire, a rite of passage into the meaning of life according to Disney,” the cleric said. “Where once morality and meaning were available as part of our free cultural inheritance, now corporations sell them to us as products.”

The sprawling corporation, founded by brothers Walt and Roy Disney in the United States in 1923, has produced more than 200 films in the 85 years since, and today owns 11 theme parks and several television networks around the world.