ROME, April 4, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Mainstream media was in a furor last week over the news of Pope Francis purportedly saying that “hell does not exist” and that unrepentant souls in mortal sin simply “disappear.”
On the eve of the Holy Thursday, an Italian journalist published an article claiming that the pope had told him that hell does not exist. Eugenio Scalfari, 93, atheist journalist and founder of the left-wing newspaper La Repubblica, claimed on March 28 that Pope Francis had told him two days before that the souls of those who do not go to heaven are annihilated.
“Souls are not punished,” Francis allegedly said. “Those who repent obtain God's forgiveness and go among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear. There is no hell — there is the disappearance of sinful souls."
Scalfari’s article — and then the Vatican’s vague warnings not to trust it — was picked up by mainstream media worldwide.
The story was highlighted in the United States by the Drudge Report, whose online headline shrieked “Pope Declares No Hell?” It linked to a March 29 article by Michael W. Chapman of CNS News, who called Francis’s alleged remarks “a denial of the 2,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of Hell and the eternal existence of the soul.”
Chapman cited the translation of the popular Catholic news blog “Rorate Caeli.”
The New York Times led with the news that the Vatican had responded to the Repubblica piece with an assertion that Pope Francis does indeed believe in hell and that “no quotation of the article should be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.” READ MORE
