Papal eulogy for his atheist friend

"An old Lucifer in flames" - Eugenio Scalfari, the bard of the Bergoglian parallel doctrine, has passed away.

Source

Eugenio, the Pope's friend, or: the Pope who had a freemason and atheist for a friend and did not convert him.

Yesterday Eugenio Scalfari, the atheist friend of Pope Francis, passed away.  The newspaper, La Repubblica published today an obituary by Francis on the founder of this newspaper.  The relationship between Pope Francis and the Masonic atheist, Eugenio Scalfari is one of the most telling and puzzling aspects of the current Pontificate.  Significantly and enigmatically, though unsurprisingly, the obituary is a eulogy.

Eugenio Scalfari, born in 1924, was a journalist and public relations expert all his professional life, coming from an upper middle-class family with a long Masonic tradition, earning his first spurs in Fascist dailies and being co-founder of the radical-liberal, anti-clerical Radical Party in 1955.  From 1962-1968, he was Editor-in-Chief of the weekly magazine Espresso (comparable to the German Spiegel), from 1968-1972, an independent member of parliament of the Socialist Party PSI.  In 1976, he founded the daily newspaper, La Repubblica (to the left of the upper-middle-class liberal, Corriere della Sera) of which he was Editor-in-Chief until 1996 and then its publisher.  He described himself as an atheist.  He never described himself as a Freemason but he liked to show off the ancestral gallery of his direct ancestors who were lodge brothers.

As a headline for the Papal obituary, the editors chose the words:

"Eugenio, my secular friend, I will miss talking with you."

Son of good family which held over generations onto to the credo of the Grand Orient

Scalfari himself took part in every socio-political struggle since the 1950s that was supposed to take the world a little further to the left.  Besides the political right, the targets of his media activism were above all the indissolubility of marriage, the sanctity of human life and, time and again, the Catholic Church and its dogmas.  He was successful in many battles as an extra-parliamentary spokesperson: in the 1970s, divorce and abortion were legalised, and a few years ago, "gay marriage" and euthanasia.

It was therefore all the more striking that Pope Francis found his most enthusiastic fans - there is no other way to put it - in the ranks of the anti-clerical Radical Party, the radical-liberal micro-party which, as a hinge between the Marxist left and the left-liberal bourgeoisie, exerted great influence on political developments in Italy and beyond.  These supporters ranged from Marco Pannella to Emma Bonino (after all, former Foreign Minister, EU Commissioner and Soros Prize winner and a "great person" for Pope Francis) to the now deceased Eugenio Scalfari.

All came from well-to-do bourgeois families, were wide open to socialism but never joined the communist movement and internalised the emancipatory urge of liberalism, which still precedes socialism, which is why they were able to become leading exponents of the political left in numerous struggles.  Their struggle was for the legalisation of divorce, abortion, euthanasia, drugs and homosexual rights.  Eugenio Scalfari led it as a powerful doyen of Italian left journalism from the columns of the daily newspaper which he founded.

Marco Pannella, the "Mangiapreti" (the priest-eater), another friend of Scalfari, became an "energised" fan of Francis.  Pannella, who died in 2016, had demonstrated against the Church in St. Peter's Square under Pope Benedict XVI with the slogan "No Taliban, No Vatican" and put the Vatican on a par with the Islamist Taliban.  Under Pope Francis, the same Pannella unforgettably shouted:

"Viva il Papa!  We radicals love him very much", so much so that Pannella wished "I want to become a Vatican citizen".

Pannella and Scalfari were two leading founders of the Radical Party. Eugenio Scalfari was decorated by the Duce of Fascism Benito Mussolini.

Eugenio Scalfari's interviews with Pope Francis became downright infamous.  In November 2014, Katholisches.info wrote to clarify:

"The jubilation of the Scalfaris and Pannellas is not the jubilation of those who have found or re-discovered the faith but of those who feel they have 'conquered' even the Vatican with their positions."

How could such dogged abortion lobbyists see a "friend" in Francis?  Were they even deceived by the Pope, as some of their supporters suspected?  Nothing of the sort.

Bergoglio made it clear right at the beginning of his Pontificate that the fight for "non-negotiable values" was not his fight.  Rather, he made a serious break, describing his predecessors' stance on the right to life issue as "obsessive".  Quite Bergoglian, Francis did not change the Magisterium formally but he did change it factually, in line with the principle he advocated that practice comes before theory.  For Scalfari and Pannella, this counted for far more than an occasional but inconsequential criticism of the killing of unborn children.  Francis' recent dagger thrusts against the majority of US bishops on the communion issue for pro-abortion politicians re-inforced this Papal maxim.

Thus Francis was able to establish an unofficial, parallel magisterium, whose bard was his friend Eugenio Scalfari.  This "new Magisterium", also called the "Scalfari Magisterium" and never really denied by the Holy See, promulgated a new doctrine more similar to that of the Lodge than of the Church.  In 2019, all the conversations, interviews and telephone calls that Scalfari subsequently reported to the world were collected and printed in the book "Il Dio unico e la società moderna" ("The One God and Modern Society").  It contains all the statements of the reigning Pope that have caused considerable irritation in the Church in the past and will probably continue to do so.  Scalfari always insisted on their authenticity – which was unchallenged.  In the sub-title of the book, Scalfari made it clear that he was building a bridge, because the publication included all "encounters with Pope Francis and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini".  The latter had already died in 2012, not without having vigorously called on Benedict XVI to resign two months before his death.

In 2019, Catholic.info wrote:

"Eugenio Scalfari is older than the Catholic Church leader by twelve years.  How can their relationship, which is obviously consciously surrounded by an aura of the unclear and opaque, be described?  Most likely as congenial, since a certain affinity of spirit can hardly be denied after six years of irregular but, despite all criticism, continuing 'collaboration'."

Tenets of the Bergoglian Scalfari doctrine are:

that there is no "absolute truth" for Christians;

that good and evil are merely subjective opinions;

that there is "no Catholic God";

that Mary, the Mother of God, under the Cross, might have felt like wondering if she was being "tricked" because the Messianic promises must have seemed like "lies" to her;

that Jesus Christ is "not" the Son of God;

that "sin is abolished";

that "hell is abolished";

that mankind is to be absorbed into one "universal race” through race-mixing;

that conversion is not necessary.

The atheist, Scalfari wanted to "carve out for himself a tailor-made, fluid and relativistic Christianity", as Il Giornale stated at the end of 2013.  And Francis supported him in this.

The Vatican spokesman at the time, Fr Federico Lombardi, sheepishly and half-heartedly opposed it, but soon had to realise that Santa Marta had not issued an order for a denial.  So the statements remained unresolved.  This was obviously the way it was meant to be.  Even more: the Vatican Publishing House even published the first and most irritating interview in book form.  More affirmation is probably not needed.

In 2019, the second book was published entitled "Grand Hotel Scalfari.  Confessioni libertine su un secolo di carta" ("Grand Hotel Scalfari. Libertine Confessions about a Century of Paper", Marsilio Editori, 2019), a benevolently conceived biography in the form of a book of conversations.  Katholisches.info wrote illuminatingly about it:

"Scalfari, though long since relinquished the editorship, retained his clout and his column.  Some, including Catholics, lulled by the accusation of spreading conspiracy theories, do not like to hear it, but for Scalfari it is important: he is proud of his Masonic origins.  He is silent about his own Lodge affiliation but likes to point out that his grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather... were already brothers and founders of lodges.  'My ancestors founded lodges all over the Catanzaro area', Scalfari himself quotes in the book a Masonic friend who said of his grandfather, a 'convinced socialist', that he was 'like an old Lucifer in flames'.   Similar allusions abound in this book, while he hints more clearly than before at having joined the Lodge in San Remo immediately after the war.  He does so, not without reference to the fact that in 1874 the Lodge Liguria was founded in San Remo, predecessor of the Lodges now working there, and published the newspaper, Lucifero. For the Lodge brothers, Lucifer is not the personified evil of Christianity, but the 'bringer of light', who is worshipped in Lodges and whose knowledge is sought."

With this in mind, we publish Pope Francis' obituary of his friend Eugenio Scalfari:

"Eugenio, my secular friend, I will miss talking with you"

from Pope Francis

I am saddened by the death of Eugenio Scalfari, founder of the daily newspaper La Repubblica.  In these painful hours I am close to his family, his loved ones and all those who knew him and worked with him.  He has been a loyal friend to me.  I remember him telling me during our meetings at Casa Santa Marta how he tried to grasp the meaning of existence and life by exploring everyday life and the future through meditation on his experiences and his wide reading.  He described himself as a non-believer, although in the years I knew him I also thought deeply about the meaning of faith.  He always wondered about the presence of God, about the last things and about life after this life.

Our conversations were pleasant and intense, the minutes with him flying by, punctuated by the cheerful confrontation of our respective opinions and the exchange of our thoughts and ideas but also by moments of joy.

We talked about faith and worldliness, about everyday life and the great horizons of humanity in the present and the future, about the darkness that can envelop man and the divine light that can illuminate his path.  I remember him as a man of extraordinary intelligence and ability to listen, always searching for the ultimate meaning of events, always eager for knowledge and testimonies that could enrich the understanding of modernity.

Eugenio was an intellectual open to the present, courageous, transparent in describing his fears, never nostalgic for the glorious past but looking forward, with a touch of disillusionment, but also with great hopes for a better world.  And he was enthusiastic and in love with his work as a journalist.  He left an indelible mark on the lives of many people and charted a professional path that many of his collaborators and successors have followed.

At the beginning of our exchanges by letter and telephone, and in our first conversations, he had expressed his astonishment at my decision to call myself Francis and wanted to understand the reasons for my decision.  And then he was very fascinated by my work as a pastor of the universal Church, and in this sense he argued aloud and in his articles about the Church's commitment to inter-religious and ecumenical dialogue, about the mystery of the Lord, about God, source of peace and source of ways of concrete fraternity between individuals, nations and peoples.

He emphasised the crucial value - for our society and for politics - of sincere, fruitful and continuous relations between believers and non-believers.  He was fascinated by various theological issues, such as mysticism in the Catholic religion and the passage in Genesis which states that man was created in the image and likeness of God.  And the composition and characteristics of the populations that will inhabit our common home of the earth in the coming decades.

From this day forward, I will keep in my heart the kind and precious memory of the conversations with Eugene that took place during these years of my pontificate.  I pray for him and for the consolation of those who mourn him.

And I commend his soul to God for eternity.