00 10/10/2017 00:17

With apologies and thanks to AKA CATHOLIC, whose 'anathema' banner I have adapted…

Antonio Socci comments on his Facebook page on a passage in an article by Eugenio Scalfari in today's La Repubblica:


Heretical???

October 9, 2017

Today, Scalfari has once again attributed to Bergoglio the thesis that Hell does not exist and that the soul is not immortal for everyone, thus attributing two heresies to him. Bergoglio has never denied previous statements of Scalfari to this effect and continues to treat him as a confidante and friend to whom he entrusts his thoughts [such as they are]. But can a pope really behave this way? [Yes, he can – and does, as and when it suits him – if he happens to be Jorge Bergoglio, who apparently thinks that having been elected pope means he has absolute sovereignty over everything and everyone in the Church, not excluding Jesus Christ himself, whom he has felt free to 'edit'. 'correct' and 'update' as he sees fit!]
I think that the pope should publicly deny these particular statements attributed to him. [Don't hold your breath!]

I tried, of course, to find the entire Scalfari article only to find out that Repubblica now has a paywall… But it seems the para-Vatican site IL SISMOGRAFO carried the entire article, which turns out to be a book review by Scalfari of a new book by Mons. Paglia.

Here is more of Scalfari’s article translated… in which things are even worse than the excerpt highlighted by Socci.

The church that fights narcissism
By Eugenio Scalfari
Translated from
LA REPUBBLICA
10/9/2017

Was Scalfari even aware of the dark irony in his title for this piece – when both Jorge Bergoglio and Vincenzo Paglia are arguably narcissists of the first order (do not forget the mural in Terni where Paglia had himself depicted among homosexual sinners)? Anyway, he part about Bergoglio’s beliefs – as Scalfari reports them, at least – came in becaused by Paglia in his book, entitled Il Crollo del Noi (The collapse of the ‘we’) [as opposed, that is, to the ‘I] apparently devotes much space to the Genesis account of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise after having listened to the Devil in the form of a serpent:

...Here we have a problem that is not easy to resolve: To what do we owe the existence of the Devil? Is he a power opposed to God, or is it God himself deliberately disguised as the opposite of his nature? [Surely he jests!] The Catholic-Christian religion [That’s a new one! Is there a Catholic non-Christian religion?] obviously distinguishes between good and evil, but does not confront the origin of evil. Is it God himself who created it having given his human creatures free will? [Scalfari obviously thinks he’s clever asking that, but the revolt of Lucifer and his band of ‘angels’ preceded the creation of man! Perhaps the metaphysical answer is that everything created by God inherently possesses qualities that are polar opposites – day and night, good and evil, etc. and that reality is nothing but a manifestation of these qualities in varying degrees.]

Pope Francis, preceded in this by John XXIII and Paul V, [Really??? Must check that out!] but a more revolutionary force with respect to ecclesial theology, has abolished the places where, after death, souls are destined to go: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise. Two thousand years of theology have been based on this version of the Afterlife that the Gospels confirm. [So, by what authority, and more importantly, by what power, other than his hubris that he really is JESUS II - can Bergoglio 'abolish' these things? In effect, he really is doing away with three of the Four Last Things - in Christian eschatology, the Quattuor Novissima that are the last stages of the soul, i.e., Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.]

Note, however, that in part, this harks back to the letters of St. Paul (to the Corinthians and to the Romans) and in even greater part, to Augustine of Hippo, on the subject of Grace. Namely, that all souls are endowed with Grace and are therefore born perfectly innocent and remaining so as long as they do not embark on the path to evil. If they are aware of their evil and fail to repent even at the moment of death, then they are condemned.

Pope Francis, I repeat, has abolished the places of eternal residence for souls in the Afterlife. The thesis he maintains is that souls dominated by evil and unrepentant to the end simply cease to exist, while those who have been rescued from evil are assumed into the beatitude of contemplating God. [And this is not heaven? What about Purgatory for imperfectly rescued souls?]

This is the belief of both Francis and Paglia. I make here my own observation: The Universal Judgment in Church Tradition thus becomes devoid of sense. The souls who chose to be evil simply disappear, and the Last Judgment is nothing but a simple pretext that has led to splendid works of art. Nothing else but that. [Scalfari chooses to extrapolate on the Bergoglio-Paglia hypothesis that not all souls are immortal! As for the Last Judgment, I thought Scalfari had made it a point to study the Gospels thoroughly – did not Jesus himself refer to the Last Judgment literally and in other ways???]

Recently, I discussed this with pope Francis, asking him whether Spinoza’s condemnation could be revoked. His answer was No – that the transcendence of God could not be questioned, that without transcendence, the Divine Being would cease to exist if and when human beings disappear from the earth. If God were immanent, even he would disappear. [Well, bravo for Bergoglio on this point!] That is why Spinoza’s condemnation cannot be revoked. For a non-believer, this position is not acceptable even if reason says that transcendence is something comprehensible.

I shall close this book review with something Paglia wrote which illustrates the nucleus of this thinking: “Those who believe in God [religious persons] and those who believe in man [humanists] find a precious alliance in encountering the poor. [Paglia and Scalfari seem to think that believing in God and believing in man are mutually exclusive, even if the order of belief is different.][/dim I would say that one must start from this in order to repair the lacerations present in our society. Involvement in rescuing the poor draws an edifying line of change. For Christians, this humanism is fundamental: whoever encounters the poor encounters God himself”. [BS! If God is in every creature, as apparently Paglia believes, do we not encounter God in every man, animal and plant? In fact, we are taught in our earliest catechism that GOD IS EVERYWHERE, even if it is the basic reality that we all tend to forget almost all the time, because if we were mindful of it, then we could not offend him in any way by violating his law, i.e., by sinning.]

For my part, I will add: For non-believers, an encounter with the poor is an encounter with the secular values of liberty, equality and brotherhood. [As if the non-poor were excluded from this brotherhood!]

The tidal wave of anti-Catholic thought spewing forth these days from the pope and his followers appears to be on the rise (the recent Jesuit-sponsored Boston conference on AL is a veritable cesspool of it) after and despite the CORRECTIO, and probably because of it. Just to show all orthodox Catholics who is ruling the roost now, and tough luck if you can't live with it!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/10/2017 03:00]