TRATCAST EXPRESS
It's Thursday, March 29th, 2018.
All hell is breaking loose today.
More or less literally, as the Italian paper La Repubblica
reports in today's edition that Francis told journalist Eugenio Scalfari
that hell does not exist.
According to the article published in La Repubblica,
Scalfari asked the Pope what happens to the souls of the reprobate when they die.
And Francis answered,
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.
Unquote.
Now that is as heretical as heretical gets.
And I'm not even going to bother proving it now.
You can look it up in any pre-Vatican II dogmatic theology manual in Denzinger and so on.
And you can also look up our blog post on the issue with today's date at
Now bloggers and journalists and Francis apologists are running around like chickens with their heads cut off over this.
And the Vatican press office,
has now issued a statement as follows.
Quote,
The Holy Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica
in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter,
without, however, giving him any interviews.
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,
of the words of the Holy Father.
Unquote.
Hmm.
Now isn't that an interesting denial?
Or is it even a denial?
It's quite a bit confusing.
What are they saying?
That Scalfari made it up?
Granted, he's almost 94 years old,
and he reportedly doesn't take notes during his interviews,
nor does he record them.
And he really simply recounts everything from memory.
And yet,
again and again,
Francis uses this man as his preferred journalist for interviews.
In other words,
Francis doesn't seem to have a problem
with how Scalfari reports their conversations.
The Vatican,
probably scared to death that Francis may very well have actually said this,
decides to hide behind the claim that Scalfari's repetition
of what Francis told him isn't trustworthy.
And yet,
Francis has never,
never said or indicated anything of the kind.
Francis doesn't seem to have a problem with Scalfari at all.
94 years of age or not,
it's not very likely that Scalfari got this one wrong.
There is no hell.
There is the disappearance of sinful souls.
That's not very difficult to get right.
And if Francis really didn't say that,
well,
then there's only one thing for him to do.
Come out and speak to the press.
It's not like he's a stranger to that.
And proclaim that he did not say such a thing.
That Scalfari got it wrong or that he lied or whatever.
And that this is heresy.
And that,
of course,
no Christian is allowed to deny the existence of eternal punishment in hell.
Nothing less than that will do here.
Is that going to happen?
Of course not.
And honestly,
let's be serious.
It's not like it's totally inconceivable that Francis would say something like that.
He's a naturalist after all.
On February 1st of this year,
he reflected on death in his homily at the Casa Santa Marta.
And he didn't mention judgment,
heaven or hell at all.
How's that for a reflection on death?
Then today,
of all days in remarks made after the foot washing ceremony at a prison in Rome,
and yes,
he was able to kneel for that.
Can you imagine?
In remarks made after that ceremony,
Francis again denounced capital punishment and also life imprisonment saying,
quote,
there is no just punishment that doesn't leave room for hope.
A punishment that's not open to hope is not Christian.
It's not human.
Unquote.
And there you see that he's a naturalist.
Because to him,
hope means not the hope of eternal life
and the hope of God providing his grace to attain it,
which is obviously a supernatural reality,
but hope for life in this world,
in this natural world.
So this fits perfectly with his idea of there being no hell,
but only the annihilation of souls.
That souls simply stop existing after they are,
are condemned.
And by the way,
who among Novos Ordos actually does believe in hell anyway,
and believes that souls actually go there.
But then what about those statements in the past in which Francis has mentioned
hell?
There aren't many by Francis,
but there are a few.
For example,
in 2014,
he said that unless the members of the mafia convert,
they will go to hell,
not convert to Catholicism,
of course,
but just to,
no longer being in the mafia.
That's a different issue though.
Well,
what about that?
Actually,
it's very easily reconciled.
Francis believes that people do go to hell and once they're there,
they are annihilated.
Maybe they have to wait there to the end of the world,
but that's it.
And if I'm not mistaken,
that is the belief also of the seventh day at Venice and the Jehovah's witnesses.
Hell exists.
It's just not everlasting.
Those who go there before long will cease to exist.
And that's how we can understand Francis' reported words that there is no hell,
meaning there is no eternal hell.
There is no eternal punishment in hell.
There is no hell the way the Catholic Church teaches it.
How's that for a hermeneutic of continuity?
By the way,
this whole thing about Scalfory not using a recording device and not taking notes during his interviews,
I think that's a clever ruse.
I'm not saying it's a lie.
I mean,
Scalfory himself said it.
No,
it could just be that Francis is simply happily taking advantage of that fact so that he can fall back on it
in case he needs to have some plausible deniability for his heresies and other errors.
See,
in this way,
he can cause all the damage he wants and yet always leaves open a little back door for those who want,
you know,
to defend him from the charge of heresy.
That would explain why he keeps going back to Scalfory to give interviews.
If there were a genuine problem here,
this could be fixed very easily.
You either stop giving interviews to Scalfory altogether,
or you tell him that unless he starts recording the conversations and transcribing the words accurately,
he's not getting any more interviews.
That's how a reasonable person would approach this.
But,
of course,
that's not what's happening,
is it?
And there's a reason for that.
You know,
I really wasn't going to give you an express podcast this week because I'm actually in the middle of recording the new full-length
Trapcast that you've been waiting for,
episode number 21,
but I just had to interrupt that for this breaking news.
It's a crazy,
crazy day today,
and it's Holy Thursday.
You know,
we really should not be thinking about Bergoglio,
but he always manages,
somehow,
to get the focus on himself.
Trapcast 21,
by the way,
was supposed to come out this week,
and I'm still planning on releasing it no later than Saturday.
But just in case it is delayed by a day or two,
you can thank Frank.
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