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]
