By Steve Skojec, April 3, 2018
Italian Journalist and author Antonio Socci has made waves this week with a piece of commentary, posted on his website on Easter Sunday, alleging that Pope Francis’s most recent conversation with La Repubblica publisher Eugenio Scalfari on the supposed non-existence of Hell has made bigger ripples throughout the Vatican than can be seen on the surface.
According to Socci, the Vaticanist website Il Sismografo — which sources in Rome confirm is widely read within Vatican circles — lamented on Holy Saturday that despite the so-called “denial” from the Vatican (which wasn’t actually a denial at all) that the pope said what Scalfari reported — namely, that Hell does not exist and that the souls of the unrighteous are annihilated — “already now for 48 hours it has caused an avalanche on the web, in every language.”
Socci says that the effects were felt mostly abroad, with very little pickup in the Italian press — so little, in fact, that La Repubblica hasn’t even mentioned the Vatican’s “denial” of the report made by its founder.
“It’s strange,” writes Socci, “in fact, this story made the specter of impeachment for heresy hover (and perhaps it still is hovering) over Bergoglio, which could cost him the papacy.”
Socci argues that
There are only two possibilities: either Bergoglio did make the explosive heretical affirmations which “The Times” carried with the headline “Pope Francis Abolishes Hell”, or else Scalfari made it all up and thus committed an unheard of professional gaffe which undermines the credibility of “Repubblica”, a very “loud” mistake to make at a time when every day they are decrying “fake news.”
Socci argues that “every published interview is a reconstruction,” and that this excuse is not enough to dismiss concerns over what the pope is alleged to have said. “The Vatican,” he says, “should tell us if Bergoglio disavows and rejects the statement that was attributed to him or not”. But Socci has a theory as to why they haven’t, and it matches what we’ve been saying here for some time:
There is thus a game being played by Scalfari and Bergoglio for over five years now, in which the Argentine pope consents to a sort of double Magisterial track. When he speaks to Catholics he expresses himself in a certain vague and theologically ambiguous way. He avoids explicit statements and thus little by little demolishes doctrine (the tactic of boiling frogs slowly).
Meanwhile, he speaks through Scalfari to the secular world, making known his true ideas, which are so totally modern, in order to build up his “revolution” and to have popularity among non-Catholics and the media. [emphasis in original]
Socci informs his readers that Cardinal Martini — the former leader of the St. Gallen Mafia which conspired to elect Bergoglio and “one of the great precursors of this pontificate” — wrote of a very similar eschatological view not long before his death:
I nourish the hope that sooner or later everyone will be redeemed. I am a great optimist…. My hope is that God welcomes everyone, that He is merciful, and becomes ever stronger. On the other hand, naturally, I cannot imagine how people like Hitler or an assassin who abused children can be close to God. It seems easier for me to think that these sort of people are simply annihilated…
Those who promote these progressive theological ideas, argues Socci, want to be “more merciful than God and than Jesus Himself, who in the Gospel describes with terrible words the punishments of Hell. This is the meaning of Bergoglian mercy: to improve the mercy of Jesus.”
But Scalfari, Socci reminds us, has attributed similar statements to Francis several times over the last few years — a fact I documented in my own commentary on the matter last week. “The Vatican has never denied it.” Socci says. “It drew no reaction from the confused and annihilated Church. And so this time somebody thought that the moment had arrived to put these Bergoglian concepts inside quotation marks.”
This is a noteworthy development on its own — one I had not picked up on until seeing Socci’s analysis. The idea of the pope’s words being placed within quotation marks, rather than simply recounted and obviously paraphrased. Curious, I went looking. In October of 2017, in a review of a book by Archbishop Lorenzo Paglia, Scalfari makes a claim about what Pope Francis believes about Hell, but there are no quotes, just a simple assertion:
Pope Francis – I repeat – has abolished the places of eternal residence in the afterlife of souls. The thesis he advocates is that souls dominated by evil and not repentant cease to exist while those who have redeemed themselves from evil will be assumed in bliss while contemplating God.
And in 2015, the first time Scalfari published his conversations with Francis on the topic, we see a similar presentation:
What happens to that lost soul? Will it be punished? And how? The response of Francis is distinct and clear: there is no punishment, but the annihilation of that soul. All the others will participate in the beatitude of living in the presence of the Father. The souls that are annihilated will not take part in that banquet; with the death of the body their journey is finished.
There are no quotation marks in either previous example. But this time, Scalfari has framed the entire conversation with them, lending a deeper assertion of specificity and accuracy to the representation of his words.
Still, Socci says, the Vatican ignored the escalating news coverage of the statement for hours when it came out on Holy Thursday, until finally, in the afternoon, a statement — the now-infamous non-denial — was issued. “Why?” Socci asks, “What happened?”
And this is where Socci claims an unexpected intervention took place:
It appears that this time – in the face of a direct quotation from Bergoglio stating two explicit heresies, contradicting two fundamental dogmas of the Church – an important cardinal (non-Italian) was outraged, called several of his colleagues and then, also in their name, directly sought to find out from the pope exactly what this interview could mean – because professing explicit heresy is one of the four reasons the Petrine ministry can be lost.
Bergoglio then consulted with the Sostituto [of the Secretariat of State] Msgr. Becciu and decided to quickly run for cover through his spokesman, while Scalfari, who is in on the game to this very moment, was given a heads-up. [emphasis added]
If true, this is a significant moment for the papacy of Francis. If a cardinal was, in fact, able to force the so-called “Dictator Pope” to back down, it indicates that the balance of power in Rome is shifting, and Francis, who is often seen as autocratic and difficult to rein in, may now find himself in a much more precarious position than we’ve previously seen.
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Keep reading for our translation of Antonio Socci’s full commentary follows in the next article.