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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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Is it possible that even sites like Father Z and Rorate caeli knew about a new editorial about Pope Francis by Eugenio Scalfari and so far have not noted it at all? Has the Catholic blogosphere developed a deliberate attitude to ignore Scalfari? Personally I would too, except that he does not seem to tire - in his utter besottedness about Jorge Mario Bergoglio - to sing his praises, and in the process, attribute more outrageous anti-Catholic statements to him - which, unfortunately, the Vatican allows to stand unchallenged. This time, Scalfari makes much of Bergoglian mercy and sees it not just as a possible come-on to non-believers but also as an initiative to counteract the de-Christianization of the West. In both of which his arguments are, as usual, outrageously fallacious and even pathetic in their ineffectual tendentiousness. Unfortunately, he is Scalfari, and Repubblica is one of Italy's largest and most influential media outlets, so I for one cannot ignore the outrageous things he passes off as analyses...


What Pope Francis can say
to the Europe of non-believers

by EUGENIO SCALFARI
Translated from
LA REPUBBLICA
March 15, 2015

“We must avoid losing the good ones and do everything possible to save those who are lost”.

The mercy to which Pope Francis has dedicated the next Holy Year has this objective - the prodigal son of the parable whose father welcomes as a feast of life [???], forgiveness among men, and God’s infinite forgiving of his creatures. It is the pentimento whereby mercy descends on the soul and illumines it with light.

It’s not accidental that this Pope took the name of Francis, something completely unusual in the Church of Rome: The saint of Assisi saw and loved the creatures of God, all of God’s creatures, because they all carry in them a glimmer of divinity. The good shepherd is himself a glimmer who has a duty to uncover and nullify with his love all the sludge accumulated in a life that has pushed it into the abyss and suffocated its light.

But the issue of sin and repentance remains. Suppose there is no repentance? If that glimmer of divinity has been extinguished or never existed? Pope Francis has never thought that that glimmer could be extinguished or that any nature, for that matter, could be deprived of it from birth, and that is why the care of souls should never stop or be interrupted – and this is the task of the missionary Church.

One day, in one of our meetings, he spoke to me of this mission which includes even non-believers. [Excuse me, Signor Scalfari! For someone like you who has studied the Bible quite thoroughly in order to discredit it, I would imagine that should not be news to you at all! As if it was something only Jorge Bergoglio has perceived about the mission of the Church. Didn’t Jesus - in his incomparably universal view of humanity - tell his disciples, “Go and make disciples of all nations”? Did he ever say anyone was to be excluded from this mission of the Church?]

“The missionary Church,” he told me, “does not proselytize. It seeks to awaken in persons the desire to find the goodness in their soul”. [And how does she awaken that desire? She has to preach it to all who have never heard the message or who have forgotten and ignored it. And that is proselytizing - converting others to your convictions. Why treat it as if it were something evil? Or 'boring', I think the Bergoglian adjective was... In the light of events following that interview, apparently Bergoglio thinks that ‘the goodness in their soul’ includes the desire to go on living in chronic states of sin on the part of some Catholics!]

“Holiness”, I replied, “I don’t believe the soul exists. He answered, “You may not believe in it, but it exists”. This is the faith which sustains him and lights his way. Love for others is the passion that impels him. [Right! No other Pope believed in the soul, or loved his fellowmen, nor was impelled by this.]

I also recall telling him that I think there will never be another Pontiff like him, and his reply was that the Lord knows the future and has infinite mercy. [That was an answer? One might have expected the humblest of all Popes to have replied, “I am not different from previous Popes who sought to promote the faith of the Church, and future Popes will do the same”.]

Going back over the history of the Catholic Church, there were two among his predecessors who made mercy the principal theme of their Pontificate: Lambertini (Benedict XIV) in the 18th century and Roncalli (St. John XXIII) half a century ago. Almost everyone else, from the Council of Nicaea forwards, exercised both the preaching of the Gospel and management of temporal power, emphasizing one of the other according to the time in which they lived and the character of their personality. [Who, among the modern Popes, has emphasized the management of temporal power after the Vatican lost such power in 1860? Isn’t it Bergoglio, with his pro-active incursions into secular concerns – from immigration to poverty and war and climate change - who is now seeking to actively assert his influence in temporal affairs and project himself as a political statesman nonpareil in a way none of his predecessors after Alexander XVI Borgia has done?]

Francis also said, in an interview with a Mexican newspaper that he has the feeling his Pontificate will be brief, four or five years maybe, and media attention focused on this statement – Is he sick? Does he intend to resign from such a burdensome office? [Hey, Signore Scalfari – it was a Mexican TV channel, not a newspaper! You have been typically cavalier about misreporting small details which is certainly unusual in a journalist of your standing. But then you also take the liberty to ‘synthesize’ what your interlocutors tell you in a way that sometimes projects your ideas instead of theirs, or seeks to interpret what they say to conform with what you want them to say. How reliable a journalist are you, when all is said and done? – And I do not recall that the Pope's statement provoked any fresh speculation about his health or possible resignation. Many took it as Cardinal Dolan did, “Oh please! Don’t leave us! We need you! How could you say such a thing?]

He has belied both hypotheses. A year ago, returning from a trip to Korea, he already said the same thing. It is possible that he was merely reminding his interlocutor – and himself – that his chronological age corresponds to ‘old age’ and old people are always closer to death. He does not fear death which is merely a passage to the true life hereafter. [Which Scalfari does not believe in!] He fears suffering yes, and he has said so many times, but not death. [I cannot recall that he ever said he fears suffering – that would be an awful thing to say for the Vicar of Christ and the Successor of Peter – but he did say jestingly in recent days, relative to the threat of ISIS, that he does not fear death, as long as they don’t make him suffer because he is really quite cowardly in that sense! Well, how nice to hear yet another admission of human failure from the pluperfect super-Pope, but at a time when Christians are being tortured and killed in unprecedented ways from Muslim African and the Middle East to India-Pakistan and Indonesia, how could he even say that as a joke?] Death is a celebration and must be faced as such by anyone who has faith in the Father who awaits him in heaven.

And what about those who do not have this faith? His answer is that anyone who has loved others at least as much as he loves himself (possibly a little more than himself) will be welcomed by the Father. Faith helps but it is not the criterion of the God who judges - it is a man’s whole life. Sin is part of life, and so is repentance – which is remorse, a sense of guilt, a desire to be redeemed., the abandonment of selfishness. [Really? Scalfari has never read or heard of criminals and sinners who do not repent at all, in part because they think they have not committed any crime or sin????]

Whoever has had the gift of meeting Pope Francis knows that he considers selfishness the most dangerous enemy for our species. [And narcissists, of course, are never aware of their self-centeredness???] The animal is selfish because he is prey to his own instincts, the main one of which is the instinct for survival. But man is also animated by sociableness, and therefore, he feels love for others, for the survival of his species. If selfishness subverts and suffocates love for others, the divine glimmer within man is obscured and he condemns himself.

What happens to that soul which has been extinguished? Will it be punished? How? Francis’s answer is plain and clear: There is no punishment but rather the nullification of that soul. [Really? But the soul is immortal, or so all Christians are taught. Scalfari ought to know that. How can a soul be ‘extinguished?]

Everyone else will take part in the beatitude of living forever in the presence of the Father. Those ‘annulled’ souls are not part of that celebration – their course ends with the death of the bod0y.And this therefore is the motivation of the missionary Church: to save the lost souls. It is also the reason that this Pope is a Jesuit to the very core. [Isn't the mission of the Church to save all souls by bringing the Word of God to as many persons as possible?]

The Society of Jesus founded by Ignatius Loyola taught and teaches its members that the premise of mission is to be in tune with others, to be on their wavelength, otherwise dialog would be impossible. And that is why the missionary Church should update herself with the passage of time and according to place. [I’d like Fr. Schall or some reputable Jesuit to reply to this Scalfarian statement of the Jesuit mission!]

When dialog finally becomes possible among different persons, different cultures, different civilizatioNS, and even different religions, only then can the missionary Church stimulate the vocation to goodness and limit her self-love.

This teaching of Pope Francis makes a lot of sense even for non-believers because it touches a profoundly human aspect independent of faith in God and Christ his son. It is a teaching that underscores the difference between man and animals, from which he evolved, of man who has a mind that can think for itself and to judge himself with the bridle of his own narcissism while lifting his head to look at the stars.

Now Francis must face many arduous problems which have till now been barely touched on.

The first of these, which no one has yet formulated, but which is nonetheless plainly evident, concerns the priests who administer sacraments and have the power to absolve or punish those whom they consider to be sinners. [As a Jesuit-raised former Catholic, Scalfari knows very well that it is not the priest by himself who has the power to absolve but it is the priest acting in persona Christi. All absolutions are in the name of the Lord, and the priest can and does impose penance on the sinner – even if most of the time, the penance is rather token.]

Priests - and the hierarchy into which they are constituted – exist only in the Catholic Church and are prohibited from marrying.

No other religion has celibate ministers, and no other religion has its doctrine transformed into a ‘code’. [Are you kidding? What are Jewish Scriptures and their strict laws on diet and other aspects of daily life; the Muslim Quran, all its auxiliary authoritative citations, and the Sharia law derived therefrom; Buddhist scriptures and rules, etc, but ‘codes’ – i.e. codified teachings by which their faithful are supposed to live?]

The Jews have their Scriptures and their precepts, but their rabbis are only teachers, they have no sacrament [dim=9pt[??? Aren’t they authorized to conduct Sabbath and other services, officiate at marriages and the many Jewish rites of passage, and at funerals?] nor any obligation to be celibate. They explain and interpret Scriptures – that is their task and nothing more. [They are also consulted by members of their congregation on their problems, spiritual or otherwise, much like Catholics consult their parish priests or spiritual directors!]

Muslims also have their Scriptures and doctrine, but no priests or ministers at all. But the various Muslim denominations have teachers who interpret the Koran [My understanding is that the Koran has already been interpreted in the many auxiliary doctrinal documents that Islam has, and that imams or other Muslim teachers do not offer their independent interpretation of Islamic doctrine but simply point to the interpretation that they think applies best to a particular situation, because there may be more than one official interpretation, all of which are equally ‘authorized’.] But they also have tribunals which indicate the enemy who must be struck down – anyone considered an infidel (i.e., who does not profess Islam and refuses to do so).

Potentially, Islam has theocracies, sometimes directly as in Iran, and sometimes indirectly, since the temptation to fundamentalism is strong and often nefarious.

So it is that even among Christians, all the various Protestant confessions have pastors but not priests. [Scalfari appears to ignore the Anglican Tradition completely, which is almost as close to the Catholic Church in its concept of the priesthood and its hierarchy as are the Orthodox Churches, except of course, that both Orthodox and Anglicans allow their ministers to marry, even if the Orthodox will not make any married priest a bishop but the Anglicans do… All in all, Scalfari the Wannabe-Omniscient, is doing a great disservice to his gullible and uninformed readers by peddling inaccuracies about the religions, Catholic or not!]

Pastors resemble rabbis in a way – they can have families, they administer the sacraments that the various confessions have kept, but the contact between man and God is not obligatorily mediated by bishops who have the care of souls but by priests. It is a direct contact. This was Luther’s great revolution: a believer reads Scriptures, the Bible, the Gospels – and his faith allows him direct contact with God. [Scalfari makes me froth at the mouth with his non sequiturs. What ‘direct contact’ with God does all that allow, which any other believer does not have by living an intense prayer life along with a life of good work?]

So the question is this: Will the Church of Rome succeed in keeping the priestly order with its duties and rights which are almost caste-like? [But priests are a ‘caste’ apart – hence the Levites of ancient Israel, and the priesthood as Melchisedek defined it! Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican priests receive their priesthood through the sacrament of Holy Orders.]

The problem has become much more relevant in that some non-Catholic confessions are coming close to the Church of Rome and could even decide to unify with her. [Really??? And who might these confessions be? The only ones who have come back to Rome so far are the Anglicans who have joined the Ordinariates. Certainly, none of the Orthodox Churches, and not even JMB/PF’s favored ‘evangelical' Protestants, whom he has told more than once to stay where they are because they are more useful to the Church that way!] This has already happened with some Anglicans and could happen with Orthodox priests. [Scalfari omits to mention, of course, that the conversion of ‘some Anglicans’ – in groups, and not just individually – was made possible by Benedict XVI. And I am not aware that individual Orthodox priests have sought to convert to Roman Catholicism, especially because Orthodox priests generally submit to the discipline of their respective autocephalous churches, none of which at the moment, is remotely ready or willing to ‘unite’ with the Roman Church, and who continue to denounce as ‘Uniates’ the few orthodox churches that chose in the early 20th century to unite with Rome, such as the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church now headed by Patriarch Schevchuk.]

But those Protestant pastors who may decide to become Catholic bring with them families that they created legitimately, as it has been for centuries with the Oriental churches which were always Catholic but not bound by priestly celibacy. [That may be so, but in current practice, I don’t believe that married priests are all that common in the Oriental Churches, which the advocates of optional celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, love to cite as a precedent. I must check out numbers.][dim]

Then there is the other major topic of the family, to which Pope Francis has dedicated a great part of the synodal assemblies which conclude later this year. [For Scalfari to say that the Pope ’has dedicated a great part’ of the synodal assemblies to the family, is conceding that the synods were not all about the family. In fact, though ‘the family’ is the ostensible topic of the assemblies, no one is deceived as to the use of ‘the family’ as the pretext for discussing the question of remarried divorcees, practicing homosexuals and unmarried cohabiting couples, with a view to giving them a status equal to that of the traditional, normal family.]

Finally, there is the Second Vatican Council – the contact with modern culture which has its roots in the Enlightenment. That intellectual movement that had its major development in 18th-century England and France, and had in Diderot, Voltaire, Hume and Kant its greatest representatives did not believe in absolute truth but in relative truth which excludes the existence of God, or if at all, saw him as the motor for the creation of life which subsequently developed through autonomous evolution according to itsown autonomous laws.

The god of the ‘theists’ has absolutely no attribute that resembles the Christian God. He is not merciful nor vengeful [The God Christians believe in is ‘vengeful’??? He is just, not vengeful] nor generous – he does not intervene in history and destiny, and he is not concerned about good and evil. He is a motor, a cosmogonic force who lit the flame of life somewhere in the universe and has since then gone to sleep, or has concerned himself with other creations.

The Enlightenment was the basis of Europe’s modernity. The question about Vatican II which is closest to the heart of this Pope is to understand the wavelength on which he must speak to this Europe (and North America) which have become strongly de-Christianized and have therefore become missionlands once again. It is very probable that his Holy Year of Mercy is the start of a missionary action, with all its other-worldly consequences but also terribly actual in a tide of terrorism, local wars and tensions, growing violence, shattered families and desperate children, but most of all, of that most grievous of sins which is that of inequality, of poverty that is ignored, of the supremacy of power and war over love and peace.

In short, the theme of mercy is that which is most appropriate not just religiously but socially and economically in order to recover love, peace and hope out of power, war and despair.

May Pope Francis live many more years!

Frankly, I do not see how preaching Bergoglian mercy – to believers or unbelievers, it does not matter – could possibly attenuate social and material inequality (too multifactorial in its causes to be remedied by altruism), poverty, the human penchant for power, or the existence of conflicts which can lead to war. The rebellion of Lucifer and his cohort of fallen angels took place before God created man – since Satan was already there in the Garden of Eden. If angels could make war against God, how can we expect fallen men to ever avoid conflicts that lead to war?

Scalfari is so besotted with Bergoglio that he seems to believe this Pope can effect a hypothetical secular conversion to goodness of non-believers simply by preaching mercy. If non-believers buy his message of mercy, then it will be because it has nothing to do with God, nor with asking forgiveness for one’s sins. Non-believers profess ‘relative truths’, i.e., ‘truths’ which happen to be convenient to them, and could always claim they have no sins to ask forgiveness for, since they can relativize everything they do to be right by their individual standards, so they do not need mercy from anyone, least of all a God they claim does not exist.

What then is the ‘mercy’ that Scalfari thinks this Pope can sell to non-believers? Mercy with each other? With what motivation? Just because Bergoglio tells them it is good to be merciful? Non-believers recognize no divine commandment of love that obliges them to be merciful to others because 1) they do not believe there is a God, much less one who would dictate commandments to them; and 2) to be altruistic because a Pope tells them to think of their less fortunate brothers violates their absolute ‘freedom’ to be themselves and to do as they please and deem right .

Is there no one in Italy who can be honest enough to expose Scalfari’s mind for the pretentious muddle that it is and say to the world, “This emperor has no clothes!” ? His arguments, exemplified in this editorial, can be torn apart by a freshman student in logic, or by any Catholic who knows the essentials of his faith.

Scalfari must be rebutted because Repubblica is one of Italy’s most widely circulated newspapers, and its influence cannot be dismissed or minimized. How many of those who read Scalfari are not sold on the myth of the journalist-par-excellence and of an intellectual so confident and audacious in his pontifications that he has come to be called ‘the secular pope’? And now, here he is approvingly trumpeting religious views he attributes to the actual Pope, while still claiming to be an atheist! He certainly sounds as if he has been ‘ideologically colonized’ by the Pope, to use an expression introduced by Bergoglio.



Well, it’s been five days since the new Scalfari editorial, and the Vatican has not issued any statement about it, despite Antonio Socci’s rightful indignation, expressed in behalf of all Christians who are being told that the pope does not believe all souls are immortal, that some souls self-destruct because of sin so no one goes to Hell (and, the ultimate Scalfari reductio ad absurdum: there could not be any Hell because there is no need for it, or if there is, it is completely empty and will forever remain empty)…

Now, the Vatican must belie Scalfari
Translated from

March 16, 2015

He’s done it again! Clearly, Eugenio Scalfari has a special curiosity (perhaps even a certain disquiet) about our eternal destiny. [[But since he does not believe there is a soul, what eternal destiny could possibly concern him?]

On Sunday, March 15, in an editorial for La Repubblica, the newspaper’s founder attributed once more to Pope Francis – of whom he is friend, confidante and interviewer – embarrassing hypothesis which one might even say are explosive.

He wrote:

Whoever has had the gift of meeting Pope Francis knows that he considers selfishness the most dangerous enemy for our species… If selfishness subverts and suffocates love for others, the divine glimmer within man is obscured and he condemns himself. What happens to that soul which has been extinguished? Will it be punished? How? Francis’s answer is plain and clear: There is no punishment but rather the nullification of that soul. Everyone else will take part in the beatitude of living forever in the presence of the Father. Those nullified souls are not part of that celebration – their course ends with the death of the body.


He had written something similar in an editorial published in Repubblica on Sept. 21, 2014:

The pope maintains that if a person’s spirit is closed in on itself and stops being interested in others, that soul no longer radiates any force, and it dies. It dies even before the body dies – as a soul, it ceases to exist. Traditional doctrine taught that the soul is immortal. If it dies in sin, nothing is left after the death of the body. But for Francis, that evidently is not the way it is. There is no hell, nor even a purgatory.

Such a theory does not just contradict a fundamental pillar of the Catholic faith – the immortality of the soul (all souls). But it also denies another element of the faith – namely, the concrete possibility of eternal punishment in Hell, of which Jesus spoke many times and quite clearly in the Gospels [“Then he will say to those to the left of him: Begone, away from me, you who are condemned to eternal fire” (Mt 25,40). “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 8,12)].

In effect, Scalfari has once more attributed to the Pope a thesis that denies two doctrines of the Faith – a very serious matter which, if this had been truly formulated by Bergoglio, would have colossal consequences.

Since the founder of Repubblica is not just some nameless Joe, since he boasts of being a friend and confidante of this Pope and has been repeatedly given credibility by him, having been received for long conversations that have been published as interviews, it is the duty of the Vatican to reject in some way the heresies that Scalfari attributes to the Pope.

Indeed, I do not want to believe that Bergoglio thinks what Scalfari has reported about this. But it must be affirmed clearly by rejecting Scalfari’s claim. Because a journalist of his standing who repeatedly attributes heterodox theses to the Pope creates a scandal for the faithful, and he should be promptly, clearly and definitively belied.

If the Vatican fails to do this, one might conclude that the Vatican deliberately uses a double standard in which it allows certain ideas and teachings attributed to Pope Francis to circulate outside the Church. [But high-profile commentaries and reportage like Scalfari’s do not just circulate outside the Church – they resonate with far greater impact among Catholics who are hearing statements that directly oppose Catholic teaching but are not just attributed to the Pope, as Scalfari does, but said directly by him in ways fully documented on multimedia!]

But I hope that no one would wish to be counted among those who scandalize those of simple faith, bearing in mind what Jesus said of them…

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/03/2015 17:49]
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