Pope Francis’s Recent Statements Make Me Wonder If He Has Stopped Being Catholic
It’s been a puzzling week
Since his papacy began in 2013, Pope Francis has made statements that have kept the Vatican Press Secretary spinning like a political surrogate after a poor debate performance and the faithful scratching their heads. It has happened so often that in 2016 (only three years into his pontificate), a book was published with the title What Francis Really Said. Normally, these comments (both prepared and, more often, off the cuff) have fallen squarely in the arena of the ongoing culture wars.
This past week, however, his comments moved squarely into the realm of Christian doctrine itself, and there is no way to spin them. As reported by Vatican News, while speaking to a group of students at Singapore’s Catholic Junior College on September 13th, the pope said this:
“All religions are paths to reach God. They are — to make a comparison — like different languages, different dialects, to get there.”
Four days later, in a video message to a gathering of young adults at the Mediterranean Encounters 2024 conference Tirana, Albania, he showed that the earlier comment was not a slip of the tongue. Catholic News Agency reports that he told the group that “the diversity of our…religious identities is a gift…
