Eugenio Scalfari says Francis told him Jesus Christ is Not God; Vatican reacts evasively

Francis’ favorite journalist speaks…

Eugenio Scalfari says Francis told him Jesus Christ is Not God — Vatican reacts evasively

[UPDATE 10-OCT-2019 15:19 UTC: Vatican spokesman Paolo Ruffini:“The Holy Father never said what Scalfari wrote”]

[UPDATE 09-OCT-2019 22:52 UTC: Revised post to include complete English translation of Scalfari’s article]

Forget the Amazon Synod for a minute, folks. Right now all hell is breaking loose over something that happened apart from the synod: Francis’ favorite journalist, the apostate (former Catholic turned atheist) Eugenio Scalfari, published an article in today’s edition of La Repubblica (pp. 1, 33) that is causing an earthquake around the globe.

According to the 95-year-old Scalfari, “Pope” Francis told him that Jesus Christ is not God. The veteran Vaticanist Marco Tosatti was the first to blog about this bombshell story found in the Italian paper. Rorate Caeli was the first to provide a reliable English translation of the key passages. Now (this being a revision of our original post) Vaticanist Edward Pentin has provided an English translation of Scalfari’s entire article.

Here is what Scalfari wrote:

Francis and the Spirit of the Amazon

His Holiness Pope Francis has convened a synod in which more than two hundred cardinals and archbishops are taking part to deal with the problem of the Amazon.

The theme is of fundamental importance for the whole of humanity.

Francis has been launching the idea of the One God for years now.

It is obviously a revolutionary idea that involves the examination of a serious problem that affects everyone, rich and culturally evolved peoples as well as poor and desperate peoples.

The unification lies in the fact that there is an interior community: everyone must live and everyone should do so, one helping the other which in turn should adequately correspond. Rich and poor, men and women: this is our world of humans and this is what the Pope continually considers. “We have come to contemplate, to understand, to serve the people.” In this way, Pope Francis opened the work of the Synod.

The Amazon is a very serious case but it represents the history of the human race, for six years now Francis has been pointing the finger at this dramatic theme

It begins from the first page: “We have not come here to invent programs of social development or be guardians of cultures. This is not our task or at least not the main one” were the words of Francis. “Our work will be first of all to pray and then to reflect, to dialogue, to listen with humility and to speak with courage. We do not need to demonstrate our possible power in the media. This would constitute a sensationalist Church, but this is not what we conceive, we know that humans are all a part of the world in their external diversity”. Pope Francis never spoke of the “I” as the determining element of man.

Those who have had, as I have had many times, the good fortune to meet him and speak to him with the greatest cultural confidence, know that Pope Francis conceives Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, man, not God incarnate. Once incarnated, Jesus ceases to be a God and becomes a man until his death on the cross. The proof that confirms this reality and that creates a Church completely different from the others is proved by some episodes that deserve to be recalled. The first is what happens in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus goes after the Last Supper. The apostles who are just a few meters from him hear him pray to God in words that were once reported by Simon Peter: “Lord,” said Jesus, “if you can take this bitter cup away from me, please do so, but if you can’t or won’t, I will drink it to the end.” He was arrested by Pilate’s guards as soon as he left that garden. Another episode, also well known, occurs when Jesus is already crucified and there again repeats and is heard by the apostles and women who are kneeling at the foot of the cross: “Lord, you have forsaken me”.

When I happened to discuss these phrases, Pope Francis told me: “I am proof [NOW comment: this is ambiguous and should probably be translated as “They are proof”, referring to “these phrases”] that Jesus of Nazareth, once he became man, even if he were a man of exceptional virtue, was not a God at all”.

I remember these events that allowed me to meet Pope Francis several times, to discuss with him themes and problems that concern the history of humanity as a whole, but above all that closest to us from the Enlightenment to the end of our days. Pope Francis wanted to have an unscrupulous image of modern culture and he asked me to point it out to him and to examine it.

These talks were all and always reported literally in our newspaper and that is why today I feel the need to remember them, because Francis addresses the theme of ‘Amazonia but broadens the scope and comes to the conclusion that men are substantially all equal and all different. This is the trait that differentiates us from the animal genus to which we belong, we are also endowed with instincts but we do not limit ourselves to these: we have feelings. They can be good or bad, selfish or altruistic; our body and our vital organs develop these moral diversities and create a precious yet completely incorporeal organ that is our Mind. This is the reason why I have once again recalled the interests of Francis in the corporeal and spiritual knowledge of man.

He loves culture and wants to know modern society as much as possible for the obvious reason that even the Church he leads must acquire modernity in its highest part, which best contributes to a humanity that makes our existence worth living.

(Translation: Edward Pentin; bold print given; scan of original available here.)

Denying the divinity of Christ is the heresy of Arianism. It is apostasy from the Catholic religion because if Christ were not divine, the entire religion would collapse.

Various English-speaking Novus Ordo and semi-trad news sites and blogs have begun covering this story:

• Francis to Favorite Journalist: “Jesus was not at all a God” (Rorate Caeli)
• Francis: “These facts show that Jesus was not a God at all” (Mahound’s Paradise)
• Did the Pope deny the divinity of Christ? (Church Militant)
• Follow-Up: Vatican responds (Church Militant)
• Scalfari: Pope Thinks Jesus Was Not God (Church Militant)
• Francis: Jesus Was “Not A God At All” (Gloria TV)
• What We All Knew Was Coming: Antipope Bergoglio Denies the Divinity of Christ (Ann Barnhardt)
• Scalfari: Pope Francis Told Me That Jesus Incarnate Was a ‘Man … Not at All a God’ (CNS News)

The Vatican has already issued a reaction; but whoever thought that for such a whopper as this one, surely Club Bergoglio would issue a strong and categorical denial, was disappointed. The Vatican statement, released by official press spokesman Matteo Bruni, merely says:

As stated on other occasions, the words that Dr. Eugenio Scalfari attributes in quotation marks to the Holy Father during the conversations with him cannot be considered as a faithful account of what was actually said, but represent, more than anything, a personal and free interpretation of what he has heard, as seems quite evident from what is written today regarding the divinity of Jesus Christ.

(Source; Google translation with our adjustments.)

That’s it! That’s basically an elaborate way of saying, “Yeah, whatever.”

Imagine if a woman says to her husband, “Honey, what’s this I hear from your best friend Fred about you admitting to having a mistress? What happened to our marriage vow? Do you not love me anymore??” And he responds: “That cannot be considered a faithful account of what I told him since Fred only quotes from memory. Besides, you can assume it’s colored by his own interpretation, and that should be obvious.” What woman would not be furious at such an evasive answer that’s playing her for a fool?!

Ah yes, the case of Eugenio Scalfari (pictured left). He is old; he is an atheist; he doesn’t take notes and writes all his interview texts based on memory (as he himself has admitted). And yet Francis keeps giving him interviews, and the paper in which they are published, La Repubblica, is the only newspaper Francis says he reads. Any reasonable person understands that that means Francis considers what Scalfari publishes in La Repubblica to be an accurate transcription of what he actually said, a faithful presentation of his thoughts — at least accurate enough to get the point across. Besides, as Rorate Caeli notes, “the papal interviews to Scalfari have been published on the Vatican website, [and] they have been occasionally published by the Vatican publishing house (LEV) itself”.

But we need not even rely on all that. We can simply review how Scalfari’s claims have measured up in the past. Keep in mind that not once has Francis ever disputed the accuracy of any of Scalfari’s reporting or claimed to have been misunderstood or misrepresented:

• In 2013, Scalfari reported that Francis explicitly told him that he does not want to convert him back to Catholicism. Considering everything Francis has been saying and doing since, especially his recent claim that “our [religious] differences are necessary” and that God wills the diversity of religions, it must be inferred that the words that Scalfari attributed to the “Pope” were BASICALLY ACCURATE.
• In the same interview in 2013, Scalfari wrote that Francis told him: “There is no Catholic God”. Everything that has transpired since, especially (but not only) the interfaith apostasy in Abu Dhabi earlier this year and the idolatry committed last week in the Vatican Gardens, indicates that this is PROBABLY TRUE.
• In late 2015, about 6 months before Amoris Laetitia, Scalfari said Francis told him that “all the divorced who ask will be admitted” to Novus Ordo communion. That turned out to have been BASICALLY TRUE.
• Again in late 2015, Scalfari wrote that Francis said: “Never proselytize in schools.” Considering Bergoglio’s constant blasting of “proselytism”, whether in or out of school, we must assume that Scalfari’s claim is DEFINITELY TRUE.
• In 2018, Scalfari said Francis told him that the souls that die in sin and therefore cannot go to Heaven, will be annihilated and disappear — thus denying the dogma of the eternal punishment of hell. Considering that Francis never preaches about hell and tells people not to fear the Last Judgment; and considering that Scalfari had reported Francis saying this to him once before, three years prior, and Francis didn’t object or retract; one may say that this is PROBABLY TRUE.

The bottom line is this: When you put all the evidence together, you have to conclude that until there is a clear and firm denial, everything Scalfari has reported about Francis is true — even if the “Pope” didn’t say everything verbatim as reported, certainly Scalfari’s paraphrases convey accurately enough the ideas Francis communicated to him.

Part of the front page of the Oct. 9 edition of La Repubblica, in which Scalfari’s article appears

In case anyone is still trying to excuse all this, let’s be clear that if Francis did not say what Scalfari reports him to have said, the impostor from Buenos Aires has a strict duty to issue a firm, clear, and categorical denial. It is not everyone else’s job to excuse Francis; it is Francis’ job to contradict what has falsely been said about him, especially in so weighty and serious a matter — but only if it is actually false, of course.

With Francis’ history of continually giving interviews to the nonagenarian journalist in the privacy of his room at the Casa Santa Marta, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the strategy here: Francis uses Scalfari to conveniently release all sorts of theological, spiritual, and moral poison into people’s minds. He knows the press will report it everywhere, the Vatican will issue a caveat that can — but doesn’t have to be — read as a denial, and countless souls will be impacted. His useful idiots, also incorrectly known as “Catholic apologists”, will bend over backwards to tell those few who bother to look at this in depth that Scalfari is just an elderly, frail, and unreliable atheist, whereas the bulk of people will simply imbibe what Scalfari reports as “coming from the Pope” — and that’s precisely what’s intended. This is a very clever way for him to get his message out while leaving enough room for plausible deniability, should the need ever arise. This way he can say what he wants to say without having really said it. It is devilishly clever!

One might ask oneself what cause Francis would have to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. Would it really make sense for him to say Jesus isn’t God? When one looks at Francis’ pseudo-pontificate of the last six-and-a-half years, the frightening reality is that it would actually fit right in with his “gospel of man.”

It is easy to see that the Triune God is superfluous for Francis, whose “theology” is basically a spiritualized version of left-wing politics, mixed with existentalism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and humanitarianism. For his soup-kitchen theology and greeting-card spirituality, he doesn’t need our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ to be divine. As long as He was a model human, that’s good enough for him, because all Bergoglio uses our Lord for is to give people a reason to be nice to other people. Christ is used only insofar as He can be hijacked to advance the gospel of man.

Recall that in February of this year, Bergoglio signed the apostate “Declaration on Human Fraternity” in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. In the Vatican’s interreligious dialogue with Muslims and Jews, Jesus Christ is a real stumbling block, at least if He is accepted as divine. Jews believe in God being one person; Muslims believe in God being one person as well. But Catholics believe in the Holy Trinity: One God in Three Divine Persons. That isn’t helpful to interreligious dialogue! It is only reasonable, therefore, that the same Vatican II religion that claims Catholics, Jews, and Muslims “adore the one [i.e. same] God” (see Vatican II, Decree Nostra Aetate, n. 3), now has to move to deny, or at least downplay at first, the divinity of Jesus Christ. (They will take care of the Holy Ghost later, and probably with much more ease, since they can easily reduce Him to a mere “force” or “power” of the one God.)

In fact, as quoted above, Scalfari begins his article in today’s edition of La Repubblica by talking about Francis’ efforts to preach “the idea of the One God” — not “One God” in the Catholic sense of the Holy Trinity being One, but in the sense of there being “one and the same god” that is supposedly adored and shared by all religions, or by most. With hindsight we can now see that Francis has gradually been working towards this idea in the last six years, as is particularly evident in his interreligious claims and practices, for example, in his apostate Pope Video of January 2016. All this also explains why Francis has so much contempt for our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, for His holy Mother, and for the Most Holy Trinity.

We’ll finish this post with an exhortation from St. John the Apostle: “Who is a liar, but he who denieth that Jesus is the Christ? This is Antichrist, who denieth the Father, and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father” (1 Jn 2:22-23).

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Image sources: shutterstock.com / Wikimedia Commons (Presidenza della Repubblica; cropped) / La Repubblica
Licenses: paid / use permitted with attribution / fair use