To Change the Church by Ross Douthat

Author:Ross Douthat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Eight

HIS HOLINESS DECLINES TO COMMENT

At several points during his pontificate, Pope Francis granted interviews to Eugenio Scalfari, a prominent Italian journalist and noted atheist. Of all the pope’s public performances these conversations were among the strangest, because Scalfari did not take notes. Instead, the interviewer, who was eighty-nine at the time of the first interview, published “transcripts” of their conversations summoned up from memory. So while Francis tended to be more adventurous in these conversations than even in his usual off-the-cuff remarks, it was difficult to tell what the pontiff had definitely said, and what the aging journalist had embellished or invented or misinterpreted.

The initial Scalfari conversation, in the fall of 2013, was filled with striking utterances. It had the pope calling proselytism “solemn nonsense,” insisting that “there is no Catholic God,” suggesting that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them,” and wandering into faintly New Age pastures: “Our species will end but the light of God will not end and at that point it will invade all souls and it will all be in everyone.”1

The official Vatican website ultimately withdrew the interview, after briefly publishing it, with a clarification from the press office that “the text was an after-the-fact reconstruction” which had been approved by Francis without it being “clear how closely the pope read it.”2

This was the sort of modest fiasco that would normally preclude a follow-up interview, but instead the pope spoke to Scalfari again in the summer of 2014. Again there were striking formulations, including a suggestion that some cardinals were guilty of abusing children and a pledge to “find solutions” to the “problem” of priestly celibacy.3 Again there was a declaration from the Vatican press office that while the “spirit” of the conversation was accurate, “individual expressions that were used and the manner in which they have been reported cannot be attributed to the pope.”4 Then the same dance played out again in the spring of 2015, when Scalfari’s text had the pope speculating, heretically, that lost souls would be “annihilated” instead of damned.5 Once more the press office characterized the interview as “private discussions” whose details could not be confirmed.6

By this point it was clear that Francis saw an advantage in this sort of deliberately unreliable communication—whether as a form of freewheeling dialogue with a nonbeliever, a means to communicate very informally to supporters, or simply a way to talk casually without the strictures that an actual interview transcript would impose. So it was not surprising that he returned to Scalfari following the second synod on the family, speaking with him by telephone three days after his blistering closing remarks. The conversation, or at least Scalfari’s reconstruction thereof, appeared in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica a week later, and it included this response to a question about the pope’s intentions for communion and the remarried and the outcome of the synod:

“This is the bottom line result,” Francis said (supposedly).

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