That odd declaration came after the newspaper La Repubblica published a front-page article on Thursday by an atheist, left-wing and anticlerical giant of Italian journalism, who reported that during a recent meeting the pope had said that hell did not exist.

Bad souls are "not punished," the journalist, Eugenio Scalfari, 93, reported the pope as saying. "A hell doesn't exist."

Nor, for Mr Scalfari, does a tape recorder or notebook or the orthodoxy of quotation marks.

The Vatican characterized the remarks as misquotations.

In the past, Mr Scalfari, the founder of La Repubblica, a bible of the Italian left that he edited for decades, has admitted to sometimes putting words in the papal mouth.

But the infernal remarks, especially as the pope prepared for Easter Sunday celebrations, proved too tempting for international tabloids, conservative websites antagonistic to the pope and many others to let go.

"Pope Declares No Hell," read a screaming headline across the Drudge Report website.

"Does the Pope Believe in Hell?" asked Patrick J Buchanan in an online column.

"Vatican literally falls apart after Pope Francis says ‘Hell doesn't exist,'" read a headline in Metro UK, a British newspaper.

The pope, in fact, has often talked about hell as a very real final destination for the wicked, and the Vatican made clear that the "literal words pronounced by the pope are not quoted" and that "no quotation of the article should be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father."

Mr Scalfari agreed.

"They are perfectly right," said Mr Scalfari in an interview on Friday night, as the pope prepared for a ceremonial leading of the stations of the cross on Good Friday. "These are not interviews, these are meetings, I don't take notes. It's a chat."

While Mr Scalfari said he remembered the pope saying hell did not exist, he allowed that "I can also make mistakes."

He said he had committed an error of omission by failing to fully explain the pope's answer on the need for a stronger Europe.

"At my age," Mr Scalfari said, he was more used to being interviewed than interviewing.

The editor of La Repubblica, Mario Calabresi, said the paper had not labeled Mr Scalfari's piece as an interview.

It was, Mr Calabresi said, the fruit of a "cultural exchange and dialogue out of the 19th century between a Jesuit believer and a man of the enlightenment fascinated by religion."

Sophisticated readers of Italian journalism understand how to read Mr Scalfari, which is to say, with a grain of salt when it comes to papal quotations.

To many here, Mr Scalfari personifies an impressionistic style of Italian journalism, prevalent in its coverage of the Vatican, politics and much else, in which the gist is more important than the verbatim, and the spirit greater than the letter.

And yet, despite the public relations headaches Mr Scalfari has caused, Francis, 81, seems to like talking to him.

The pope, Mr Scalfari said, has a "need to talk with a nonbeliever who stimulates him." This month's meeting was their fifth. Continue reading

• Image: NYT

Veteran journalist Eugenio Scalfari wrote in La Repubblica that the Pope made the comment during a phone interview.

According to a translation by traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli, Pope Francis said: "The diverse opinion of the bishops is part of this modernity of the Church and of the diverse societies in which she operated, but the goal is the same, and for that which regards the admission of the divorced to the sacraments, [it] confirms that this principle has been accepted by the synod."

He added: "This is bottom line result, the de facto appraisals are entrusted to the confessors, but at the end of faster or slower paths, all the divorced who ask will be admitted."

However, Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi, SJ, told the National Catholic Register : "As has already occurred in the past, Scalfari refers in quotes [to]what the Pope supposedly told him, but many times it does not correspond to reality, since he does not record nor transcribe the exact words of the Pope, as he himself has said many times."

"So it is clear that what is being reported by him in the latest article about the divorced and remarried is in no way reliable and cannot be considered as the Pope's thinking."

Fr Lombardi added that those who have "followed the preceding events and work in Italy know the way Scalfari writes and knows these things well".

Since his election in 2013 Pope Francis has given a series of interviews to Scalfari, the 91-year-old who co-founded La Repubblica and was its editor from 1976 to 1996.

Previously Scalfari is said to have not used a tape recorder during his interviews with the Pope.

In 2014, Scalfari wrote that Pope Francis indicated that some cardinals have been guilty of sexually abusing children and that the Pope made a vow to "find solutions" to the "problem" of priestly celibacy.

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• Rorate Caeli
• National Catholic Register
• Image: Il Giornale

Eugenio Scalfari, one of Italy's most prominent atheist intellectuals and for 20 years the editor of the newspaper La Repubblica, said the Pope had visited his family and blessed them following his request.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4, he said: "I have told the Pope something else. I want him to bless my family.

"'Whatever you want', he told me."

"'Just call me and I will receive your family and bless them'."

Scalfari's comments were aired last week in the United Kingdom.

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