"Pope’s favored interviewer claims Francis denies Christ’s divinity"

"Atheist Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari has claimed that Pope Francis does not believe that Jesus Christ is truly God and man.

The Pope has granted Scalfari numerous interviews throughout his pontificate, despite repeated claims from the Vatican press office that his reports are unreliable.

In La Repubblica newspaper on Wednesday, Scalfari wrote: 'Those who have had the chance, as I have had different times, to meet him [Pope Francis] and speak to him with the greatest cultural confidence, know that Pope Francis conceives Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, a man, not God incarnate. Once incarnated, Jesus ceases to be a God and becomes a man until his death on the cross.' According to Scalfari, 'When I happened to discuss these phrases, Pope Francis told me: ‘They are the definite proof that Jesus of Nazareth, once he became a man, even if he was a man of exceptional virtue, was not God at all.’...

The Holy See Press Office’s director, Matteo Bruni, issued the following official response to Scalfari’s report: 'As already stated on other occasions, the words that Dr. Eugenio Scalfari attributes in quotation marks to the Holy Father during conversations with him cannot be considered as a faithful account of what has actually been said, but rather represent a personal and free interpretation of what he has heard, as is quite evident from what has been written today about the divinity of Jesus Christ.'...

Scalfari has conducted several interviews with the pontiff. In March 2018, Scalfari claimed that the Pope told him that hell does not exist. La Repubblica claimed that Pope Francis had told him that the souls of those who do not go to heaven are annihilated. Francis allegedly said, 'Souls are not punished,' and 'Those who repent obtain God's forgiveness and go among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear. There is no hell — there is the disappearance of sinful souls.' Annihilationism is considered a heresy by the Catholic Church."