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Pope Francis | Eugenio Scalfari

VATICAN, March 29, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – In another media nightmare for the Vatican, Pope Francis has again met with Eugenio Scalfari, a 93-year-old atheist philosopher known for quoting the Pope without recording the conversation, leading to a new controversial ‘interview’ the Vatican insists is not “faithful” to the Holy Father’s words.

In the Pope’s fifth meeting with Scalfari, who is known not to take notes, the Pope purportedly said that “hell does not exist,” that unrepentant souls in mortal sin “disappear” after death, and that he is “honored” to be called a revolutionary.

The ‘interview’ appeared today in the left-leaning Italian daily Scalfari co-founded, La Repubblica, and which Pope Francis has said is the only newspaper he reads.

Scalfari described the meeting in this way:

“A non-believer and the Pope, Bishop of Rome on the chair of Peter and inspired especially by the letters of St. Paul, who transformed Christianity into a religion destined to be the most followed, together with the Muslim one, with which Francis has sought and still seeks brotherhood in the name of One God from whom all religions must be inspired.”

Scalfari reported their alleged exchange about hell as follows:

Scalfari: Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will at some point disappear and God will always create other species from his creative seed. You have never spoken to me of souls who have died in sin and go to hell to suffer for it forever. Instead, you have spoken to me of good souls who are admitted to the contemplation of God. But the bad souls? Where are they punished?

Pope Francis: “They are not punished, those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and join the ranks of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. Hell does not exist; the disappearance of sinful souls exists.”

At the end of the interview, Scalfari also expressly denied the divinity of Christ, describing Jesus of Nazareth as  “a man and no more than a man.”

With controversial headlines swirling across the globe, this afternoon Vatican press spokesman Greg Burke issued a statement confirming the Pope had “recently received the founder of the daily La Repubblica in a private meeting for Easter,” but said he hadn’t granted him “an interview.”

Burke added that “what the author reported in today’s article is the result of his own reconstruction, in which the exact words spoken by the Pope are not cited.”

“No quotation marks of the aforementioned article should therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father,” he said.

Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register said the Pope’s comments on this occasion “are questionable as they are at odds with previous statements in which he has spoken of Hell’s existence, most recently last week when he appealed to the mafia to give up their lives of crime and avoid eternal damnation.”

But he added that “Francis has also given signals to the contrary, preaching last year that ‘everything will be saved — everything’ and that at the end of history there will be an ‘immense tent, where God will welcome all mankind so as to dwell with them definitively.’”

After a similar encounter between Pope Francis and Scalfari in 2016, Riccardo Cascioli, director of the Italian Catholic daily La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, welcomed the fact that the Pope is establishing relationships with people such as Scalfari “who are far away.”

But Cascioli also warned that comments coming from such interviews become “a cause of scandal in the literal sense of the term” because they “disorientate and confuse many Catholics, also because these sentences are then used and abused” by those whose purpose is “the destruction of the Church.”

Here below is an English translation of key exchanges from the ‘interview’:

Scalfari: Does [Jesus’ Passion and Death] come from Adam and Eve’s expulsion from their earthly Paradise, from their exile to the earth where we have lived since then? Therefore creation is not the one beautifully painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but it occurs when God sees that Adam and Eve have succumbed to the flattery of a serpent devil, and have broken the only prohibition that was placed upon them. The true creation, then, is in their expulsion from the earthly Paradise, is that the creation?

Pope Francis: “Creation is not accomplished in the way [you have] described. The Creator, that is God in the highest heavens, created the whole universe and especially the energy that is the instrument with which our Lord has created the earth, the mountains, the sea, the stars, the galaxies and living beings and even the particles and atoms and various species that the divine nature has established. Each species lasts thousands and perhaps billions of years, but then disappears. The energy caused the explosion of a universe that changes from time to time. New species replace those that have disappeared and it is God the Creator who regulates this alternation.

Scalfari: Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will at some point disappear and God will always create other species from his creative seed. You have never spoken to me of souls who have died in sin and go to hell to suffer for it forever. Instead, you have spoken to me of good souls who are admitted to the contemplation of God. But the bad souls? Where are they punished?

Pope Francis: “They are not punished, those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and join the ranks of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. Hell does not exist; the disappearance of sinful souls exists.”