The Vatican said Wednesday that
an Italian journalist it has previ-
ously corrected was not speaking
accurately when he claimed that Pope
Francis denied Christ’s divinity.
“As already stated on other occasions,
the words that Dr. Eugenio Scalfari at-
tributes in quotation marks to the Holy
Father during talks with him cannot be
considered a faithful account of what
was actually said but represent a per-
sonal and free interpretation of what
he heard, as appears completely evident
from what is written today regarding the
divinity of Jesus Christ,” Matteo Bruni,
the director of the Holy See’s press office,
said in a statement Oct. 9.
The statement came in response to a
column in La Repubblica, the newspa-
per founded by Scalfari, in which the
95-year-old self-declared atheist said
that “Pope Francis conceives Christ as
Jesus of Nazareth, a man, not God in-
carnate.”
Scalfari did not claim that he had re-
cently interviewed the pontiff, only say-
ing that this was a topic he had discussed
with Pope Francis at some time in the
past.
Scalfari mentioned examples in Scrip-
tures in which Christ prayed, among
them his agony in the Garden of Gethse-
mane, to support his thesis th that Jesus
Christ was not divine.
He wrote that when he raised those
points to Pope Francis, the pope told
him: “‘They are the definite proof that Je-
sus of Nazareth, once he became a man,
even if he was a man of exceptional vir-
tue, was not a God.’”
Pope Francis has made reference to
Christ’s divinity frequently.
In Evangelli Gaudium, the pope speaks
of the “divine life” of Jesus.
In his Dec. 24, 2013 homily, the pope said
that “The grace which was revealed in our
world is Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, true
man and true God…In him was revealed
the grace, the mercy, and the tender love
of the Father: Jesus is Love incarnate. He is
not simply a teacher of wisdom, he is not
an ideal for which we strive while knowing
that we are hopelessly distant from it. He
is the meaning of life and history, who has
pitched his tent in our midst.”
Speaking of Jesus last October, the pope
said “God chooses an uncomfortable
throne, the cross, from which he reigns
giving his life.”
Scalfari, who famously does not take
notes during interviews has misrepre-
sented Pope Francis in the past.
In 2018, he claimed the pope denied the
existence of hell, and the Vatican subse-
quently said that the pope had not granted
an interview, and that the journalist had
inaccurately represented a conversation
between the men during a private Easter
visit.
“What is reported by the author in
today’s article is the result of his recon-
struction, in which the literal words pro-
nounced by the Pope are not quoted. No
quotation of the aforementioned article
must therefore be considered as a faithful
transcription of the words of the Holy Fa-
ther,” a Vatican statement said in March
2018.
The first time Scalfari reported that
Pope Francis had made comments deny-
ing the existence of hell was in 2015. The
Vatican dismissed that reporting as well.
In November 2013, following intense
controversy over quotes the journalist
had attributed to Francis, Scalfari ad-
mitted that at least some of the words he
had published a month prior “were not
shared by the Pope himself.”
