A while back Pope Francis spoke with the superannuated non-note-taking atheist Communist Eugenio Scalfari, editor of La Repubblica (his name is pronounced with the accent on the 1st syllable “SCALfari”).
One of the writers at La Repubblica, Piergiorgio Odifreddi, took on Scalfari and the “fake news” that was spread over the last few years through his sloppy and biased accounts of his conversations with the Pope (including the recent confusion about Hell). HERE
Today I read that La Repubblica fired Odifreddi. HERE
They say that its not about his critique of Scalfari. Uh huh.
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For those with the Italian for it, Odifreddi’s satirical piece is brilliant.
[blockquote]La Repubblica says that “its not about his critique of Scalfari.”[/blockquote]
I am reminded of Voltiare in Candide:
“Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.”
(In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.)
JabbaPappa: “For those with the Italian for it, Odifreddi’s satirical piece is brilliant.”
My Italian is pretty rusty, but this seems very true:
“Alla maggior parte dei giornalisti e dei giornali non interessano le verità, ma gli scoop…”
“Hell Gate” (with the space) is the name of the body of water between Queens and Randall’s Island, mostly famous for the iconic bridge that carries Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor between New York and Boston. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
As for the other “HellGate”, it seems we don’t really know what Pope Francis said although it is hard to imagine he would have denied such a basic Catholic teaching. Moreover, if he had said “no one goes to Hell” that might be understandable (even if wrong) as being a belief often held by liberals, but instead he (allegedly) doesn’t deny that the unrepentant are punished, just that they disappear rather than suffering eternal fire, not exactly comforting to those wishing there was no Hell. So the whole thing is a bit puzzling and sounds like at the very least Scalfari may have misunderstood what was said.
JonPatrick, some mediaeval theologians speculated that the nature of the individual soul was as the essence of the relationship between a person’s Flesh & Spirit, and God — according to those speculations, in damnation that relationship was destroyed, but this did not mean that the damned “disappeared” so that Hell was “empty”, because in this old speculative view, the Spirit endured and suffered the torments.
Now, such speculation eventually led to a theological dead end street, as it seems quite absurd to make such a distinction between the Spirit and the Soul, so that those ideas are now known to be incompatible with orthodoxy — but they do still resurface from time to time, often in some confused form or other that ignores doctrinal orthodoxy.
Best line in the article: “Sicuramente Bergoglio non è un intellettuale raffinato…”