Why is the Pope making life harder for Catholics?
AT a time where many Catholics around the world are facing persecution, the Pope’s Easter comments are nothing short of heretical, writes Miranda Devine.
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FOR sinners like me, the idea that hell doesn’t exist obviously is quite appealing.
But however much cafeteria Catholics may want to wish away the uncomfortable elements of their faith, the existence of hell is essential Catholic teaching: “The souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire’.”
So it doesn’t matter what this maddening Pope says, hell remains hell.
Pope Francis’ latest heretical pronouncement on the eve of the Church’s most holy days, Easter, was the last straw for a lot of faithful Catholics around the world.
In an interview with his friend Eugenio Scalfari, a 93-year-old atheist, journalist and founder of left-wing Italian daily La Repubblica, Pope Francis was quoted saying, “A hell doesn’t exist; what exists is the disappearance of sinning souls.”
This is reportedly the fifth such interview since 2013 that the Pope has given to Scalfari, who claims he doesn’t take notes or use a tape recorder, just his memory, which is remarkable for a nonagerian.
Each time, the Pope is quoted saying something heretical and every time the response is the same. The Pope says nothing, allowing the confusion to remain, and a Vatican spokesman issues a statement which claims the Pope has been misquoted.
Yet the Pope keeps allowing this supposedly inaccurate journalist to interview him and the game goes on.
No retractions, just a nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
The latest Vatican clean-up claimed Scalfari’s front-page article “should not be considered as a faithful transcript of the Holy Father’s words.”
This is just a sly dog whistle to those Catholic insurgents who want to dismantle the Church’s teachings, especially on social questions. It deliberately sows confusion and discord.
The tactic is best understood by reading the bombshell bestseller The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy. Originally written under the pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna, the author has just been unmasked as Oxford scholar Henry Sire, who was promptly thrown out of the Rome-based Sovereign Order of Malta, which reports directly to the Holy See.
Sire’s book is mainly concerned with financial and doctrinal misdeeds in the current Vatican, including the dismantling of our own Cardinal George Pell’s work rooting out corruption when he was head of the Secretariat for the Economy from 2014.
The book also describes a flagrantly active homosexual mafia in the Vatican operating under the benign watch of the Pope and a Church that still protects and rewards paedophile clerics.
Sire depicts the Pope as “a papal tyrant” presiding over a Vatican which “is systematically silencing, eliminating and replacing critics of the Pope’s views.”
The book’s references to Pell are especially fascinating to Australians. It claims that he fell out with powerful interests in the Vatican after finding 936 million euros “in the various Vatican dicasteries which had not been entered in the balance sheets, and by February 2015 the figure had risen to 1.4 billion.
“These revelations did not make him popular (and) not a single prosecution for financial crime has taken place in the Tribunal of the Vatican City State under Pope Francis.”
Trouble began for Pell in December 2015 when he contracted PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a comprehensive independent audit of all the Vatican’s bodies.
After four months the audit was suspended without cause by the Pope’s secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and in June 2016 it was officially cancelled.
When Pell and his auditor general Libero Milone tried to resist, “Vatican police raided the auditor general’s office, accompanied by members of the Vatican fire department. They detained and interrogated Mr Milone for hours, often shouting at him; this after seizing all his electronic equipment, personal and business, as well as all files present in his office.
“They then proceeded to force open the door to the office of the deputy auditor general Ferruccio Panicco, to box and carry away his files. Curiously, keys to Mr Panicco’s office and the combination to the safe were both available to the police officers, but a louder, more intimidating tactic of using axes, crowbars, hammers and chisels was preferred.”
Milone and his deputy were forced to resign.
“It was soon being said that (Milone) was getting too close to the finances of the Secretariat of State.”
Among the touchy issues Milone was pursuing was the allegation that Peter’s pence — the donations of the faithful to the Holy See — “had been diverted to aid the funding of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign the year before.”
Just days after the raid on Milone came the announcement from the Vatican “that Cardinal Pell was going to be charged with (sexual offences) by the Australian police”.
The book claims that “Pell’s enemies both in Australia and in the Vatican … point to remarkable coincidences between flare-ups in the sex-abuse case (currently under way in Victoria) and pressure moments in the Vatican war”.
Whatever is going on in the Vatican under Pope Francis, it’s damaging the Church across the world.
In China, where Catholics are persecuted and take great risks to worship in the underground Church, two Chinese bishops were reportedly ordered by the Vatican to stand aside in January to make way for Chinese government-backed bishops.
One of those “underground” bishops, Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin of Mindong, was later arrested by Chinese police after refusing to concelebrate Mass with the government-backed bishop.
For persecuted Catholics in China and elsewhere, practising their faith is difficult enough without having a Pope who seems to side with the enemies of the Church.