Pope Francis writes personal letter to atheist

From John Allen at NCR:

Although the big Vatican story in the English-speaking media today is based on comments by Archbishop Pietro Parolin, the new Secretary of State, on celibacy and democracy, attention in Italy is focused instead on the latest sensation from Pope Francis himself: a personal letter to a renowned journalist and nonbeliever, splashed across the front page of La Repubblica, the country’s most widely read daily.

In the letter, Francis makes three points that have all been said before, including by popes, but rarely with such clarity or in this kind of venue:

• God has never abandoned the covenant with the Jewish people, and the church “can never be grateful enough” to the Jews for preserving their faith despite the horrors of history, especially the Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
• God’s mercy “does not have limits” and therefore it reaches nonbelievers, too, for whom sin would not be the lack of faith in God, but rather, failure to obey one’s conscience.
• Truth is not “variable or subjective,” but Francis says he avoids calling it “absolute” — truth possesses us, he said, not the other way around, and it’s always expressed according to someone’s “history and culture, the situation in which they live, etc.”

Popes have engaged in exchanges with journalists before, including John Paul II’s interview book with Vittorio Messori, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, in 1994, and Benedict XVI’s conversation with Peter Seewald that became 2010’s Light of the World.

This is apparently the first time, however, that a pope has personally responded to questions put to him in two newspaper editorials. Eugenio Scalfari, one of the founders of La Repubblica, penned the essays in early July and again in early August, musing about questions he’d like to ask Pope Francis if he ever had the chance.

Read it all.