www.yahoo.com/news/does-hell-exist-pope ... 54139.html

"They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear," Pope Francis said, as translated by Catholic blog Rorate Caeli.

"There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls," he added.

What? Can somebody offer a context that justifies this? I tend to read Francis news with a lot of skepticism, but this seems a bit blunt. Thoughts?

The Holy See says that those aren't the pope's words:

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news ... hell-53450

Thanks. That's exactly and yet another example of why I am so skeptical of media reports of this Pope's words. I do wonder why he is so often misrepresented. Maybe my memory is the problem, but I don't recall anything like this with Benedict or JPII.

B16's Regensburg lecture was misrepresented/misunderstood. His letter about little volumes about Pope Francis' theology were... misrepresented.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraphs 1033-1037 asserts that there is the Hell.

I don't think Pope Francis is in the habit of phrasing himself as carefully as his predecessors did.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker I saw long ago that read: I know hell is supposed to be really hot, but is it humid?

A few public statements of Pope Francis warning people about the possibility of going to hell:

Warning members of the Italian mafia, 2014 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldn ... -ways.html

Lenten message, 2015 (toward the end): http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/ ... a2016.html

Fatima, 2017 - http://www.breitbart.com/national-secur ... k-of-hell/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGSsu6pfOoY NAR

What I wonder about is why does he repeatedly talk to this guy? It's not like the first time he misquoted the Pope.

I have seen it mentioned Pope Francis considers Eugenio Scalfari a friend. I am suspicious Eugenio Scalfari is not much of a friend to Pope Francis.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

There is also the possibility that he is not being 'misquoted' at all, but rather keeps talking to him because Scalfari is the only person he feels comfortable being completely honest with, and the more this happens, the less and less plausible the 'misquotation' theory becomes. After all, as the saying goes 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me five times, shame on me', or something like that.

I am no longer willing to defend the proposition that Pope Francis holds orthodox Catholic views, there have been heretical popes before, and the possibility that Francis is a heretic is something that poses no long-term threat to the faith, after all, we have not been promised that there would never be a heretical Pope.

Indeed, I am inclined to think that Pope Francis is a test from God of our loyalty to the Church.

In the last 2 centuries, we've had papal leadership that has been, overall, excellent. There has been an unusually large number of Popes who have been so great and so holy that they have been canonized, or beatified, including Pius IX, Pius X, John XXIII, John Paul II, and soon, Paul VI. And Pius XII has been declared 'venerable'. It is easy to remain a faithful Catholic when we have a good Pope, but how about a really, really bad one? Can you stay loyal even when we have a downright awful Pope? That takes real faith.

Not in this case. Pope Francis has been extremely clear in his warning(s) about the Devil and the risk of Hell/eternal damnation. If you are not clear on this you have not read enough of his homilies and speeches.

When he speaks extemporaneously during interviews on planes and trains - well, they can be brutal. I wonder which tongue he is speaking in, at times.

Pope Francis did say that Hell exists:

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/ ... 101772.htm

Because no can ever say one thing in public while believing something else in private? At any rate, the two statements can be reconciled in many ways:

1. He may believe that hell exists, but it is empty and no one ever goes there (Von Balthazar's 'Dare We Hope' thesis)

2. He may believe that hell exists, but no one is ever sent there permanently, rather they go there get reformed and then go on to heaven (the Origenist position)

3. He may believe that hell is not a place of eternal; punishment but that the souls that go there are annihilated

As a reader of Hans Urs von Balthasar (inspired by recommendation of Cardinal Ratzinger), I do not get any sense Pope Francis shares that extreme exaggeration of God's Mercy.

He has never given any indication it's a temporary state, as purgatory.

He has warned it's eternal.

Pope Francis has been quite clear on this topic.

Th Liturgy, well - that's another topic for another day...

Let me be bluntly honest with you: I have absolutely no confidence in this pope. Absolutely none. When he was first elected, my reaction was optimistic, I thought he would be a great reforming Pope. But in the first few months of his reign, I noticed that he was making a number of rather bizarre and inexplicable public statements, such as 'who am I to judge?' (is this a serious question? You're the pope, the vicar of Christ on Earth, you are the one person on this planet who is the MOST QUALIFIED to judge, to say this, is to say that you refuse to do your job) and he said 'Catholics shouldn't be breeding like rabbits', which is a comment he claims he said to a woman he met in Argentina who had 8 children, this is a statement which seems to imply that he has no problem with contraception, and indeed, maybe contraception might even be mandatory (to make sure that we don't 'breed like rabbits'), on another occassion, he made a statement that made it seem like he approved of sex change operations, and this is just the FIRST YEAR.

Over the past 5 years, I've gone from being hopeful to being confused to being angry, to where I am now, which is almost total despair at the fact that it now seems that to be a faithful Catholic, I have to completely ignore everything the Pope says and does.

Are you familiar with ER Chamberlin's classic text 'The Bad Popes'? I think that 100 or 500 years from now, someone will add a chapter to that book about Pope Francis, to go along with the chapters about Benedict IX, Boniface VIII, Celestine V, Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X.

As a practicing Catholic, I may be slightly concerned/confused with some appointments or statements made by the Holy Father. But in all Humility, it's not my place to constantly critique him. His Brother Bishops can speak to him in matters they find that could be deemed as conflicting with the faith. Nothing so far has caused my conscience any terrible conflict. I am trying to discern what this pontificate is saying about the sign of the times.