Vatican City, Oct 10, 2019 / 06:17 am
A Vatican spokesman directly denied on Thursday the report of an Italian journalist who wrote that Pope Francis said he did not believe that Jesus Christ was divine.
"The Holy Father never said what Scalfari wrote," Vatican communications head Paolo Ruffini said at an Oct. 10 press conference, adding that "both the quoted remarks and the free reconstruction and interpretation by Dr. Scalfari of the conversations, which go back to more than two years ago, cannot be considered a faithful account of what was said by the pope."
"That will be found rather throughout the Church's magisterium and Pope Francis' own, on Jesus: true God and true man," Ruffini added.
The statement came in response to an Oct. 9 column in La Repubblica, the newspaper founded by Scalfari, in which the 95-year-old self-declared atheist said that "Pope Francis conceives Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, a man, not God incarnate."