Pope faces caution and controversy
Pope Francis has presided over solemn Good Friday services amid heightened security at Rome’s Colosseum for the Via Crucis procession and a new communications controversy at home over the existence of hell.
Francis listened intently along with some 20,000 Catholic faithful as the meditations reenacting Jesus’s crucifixion were read out in the torch-lit Colosseum yesterday. At the end, he delivered a meditation of his own, denouncing those who seek power, money and conflict, and praying that the Catholic Church would always be an ‘‘arc of salvation, a source of certainty and truth’’.
Italian police, carabinieri and soldiers were on alert, with Holy Week coinciding with a spate of arrests of suspected Islamist extremists throughout
Italy and warnings from law enforcement about the return of foreign fighters from Iraq and Syria.
The Good Friday procession also coincided with a new communications controversy in the Vatican over the pope’s reported assertion that hell does not exist.
The Vatican has not denied Francis’s comments to the La Repubblica newspaper at the height of Holy Week, saying only that his quoted words can’t be considered a ‘‘faithful transcript’’ of what he said, since the journalist reconstructed a conversation. It was the fifth time in five years that Francis had spoken to the paper’s founder, Eugenio Scalfari, a 93-yearold devout atheist who admits he doesn’t record or take notes during interviews.
Nearly every time a interview has appeared Francis on the paper’s front page, the Vatican press office has insisted that his words weren’t necessarily accurate, without denying them outright or explaining what he meant.
Spokesman Greg Burke did not respond yesterday when asked whether Francis believed in the existence of hell or not.
The doubts have enraged Catholic conservatives. A leading critic of Francis, Antonio Socci, said the pope’s words ‘‘in one fell swoop wiped away all the dogma of immortality of the soul and hell. As if the church has been tricking us for 2000 years and Christ had lied by instilling in us the fear of hell’’.