The Vatican is pushing back against the claim that Pope Francis allegedly said in a Wednesday interview Hell does not exist.
Italian newspaper La Republica published an alleged interview between Eugenio Scalfari and Francis concerning the Passion of Christ and Creation. Francis allegedly made statements that contradict the Catholic catechism’s teachings on Hell, salvation and the afterlife in general. The Vatican issued a statement Thursday afternoon, claiming Francis did meet privately with Scalfari but did not give him an official interview. Therefore, La Republica’s claims could not be considered an accurate representation of Francis’s conversation with Scalfari, according to Catholic Herald.
In the interview, “The Pope: It is an honor to be called revolutionary,” Scalfari asked Francis about the eternal fate of “bad souls” of people “who die in sin.” Francis never spoke of those who will “go to Hell to suffer it for eternity,” Scalfari said.
According to Scalfari, Francis replied:
“They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell; there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
The Vatican reacted to the news on Thursday, denying the supposed interview’s accuracy to dispel any notion of scandal or heresy since the Church’s catechism “affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death, the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire.'”
“What is reported by the author in today’s article is the result of his reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father,” the Vatican’s statement read in part, according to Catholic Herald.
Scalfari, 93, admitted in both 2013 and 2016 he reconstructs his conversations with Francis entirely from memory and takes no notes or recordings during his interviews, lending credence to the Vatican’s claim his alleged quotes from Francis are not accurate. The Vatican disputed another Scalfari interview in 2014 — Scalfari claimed to quote Francis as saying two percent of all Catholic priests were pedophiles.
“As has happened previously in an analogous situation, it needs to be noted that that which Scalfari attributes to the pope, by putting his words into inverted commas, is the product of his memory as an expert journalist, but not the precise transcription of a recording,” the Vatican said in a statement in response to Scalfari’s claim, The Guardian reported.
The theological belief that sinful souls simply disappear is called the Annihilation of Souls. Certain heretical offshoots of Christianity, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christadelphians and Seventh Day Adventists adhere to the Annihilation of Souls theology, but Catholics, the Orthodox Church and most Protestant denominations reject the idea.
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