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[Catholic Caucus] Did the Vatican Denounce Scalfari? The column published yesterday by Eugenio Scalfari led to a brief reaction from the Vatican Press Office. Scalfari revealed in the daily La Repubblica that Francis entrusted him, in a personal conversation, with the conviction that Jesus Christ was "not God at all". But how did the Holy See react to this nuclear bomb of atomic bombs?Strictly taciturn. So far, only the new Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni has reacted. He said: "As has been said on other occasions, the words that Dr. Eugenio Scalfari ascribed to the Holy Father in conversations with him, are not as a faithful representation of what has actually...

[Catholic Caucus] The Evidence Suggests The Francis-Scalfari Connection is No Accident Since the news broke early this week that the nonegenarian atheist socialist editor of Italy’s La Repubblica, Eugenio Scalfari, claimed that Pope Francis told him during one of their many conversations that he did not believe Jesus was God, the Catholic commentariat has been engaged in a rhetorical battle to the death over who to believe, whether it’s true, and what it all means.For those willing to look objectively at the matter, it becomes clear that the confusion is the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the...

“The text had not been carefully reviewed,” the director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico LombardiThe Holy See has decided to delete the interview between Pope Francis and Eugenio Scalfari, the founder of Italian newspaper La Repubblica from the Vatican’s main portal (www.vatican.va). Scalfari had met with Francis to thank him for the open letter received and published by the newspaper. In response to journalists’ questions about the reason for this decision, the Holy See’s spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi replied: “The information in the interview is reliable on a general level but not on the level of each...