On Friday’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher laid out the case that Pope Francis I might be an atheist, based on the pontiff’s surprising recent statement that through good works “even the atheists” might meet Christians on the “beautiful path toward peace.”
While many observers took that to mean Francis was opening the door to salvation to non-believers, Maher drew the inference that the pope himself is a non-believer.
“I want to ask you and everybody else about something that happened last week that was important to me because I’m an atheist,” Maher said. “But you know people always say when somebody says something obvious, ‘Oh is the pope Catholic?’ I think he might not be. I think the pope might be an atheist like I think Obama is. He said this week, ‘Pope Frank’ said the Lord has redeemed all of us, not just Catholics, even the atheists. And I was like, I’m going to book my flight to heaven right now. And then of course — it’s funny because just like politics, the hierarchy at the Vatican was like, ‘What the fuck did this guy —?’ You could almost see them preparing the poison. Luckily we’ve got a spare pope. You know, one of the key things in this religion and most religions is monopoly only through us. Even hippie Jesus said that. Only through me. So this guy is saying everybody gets to heaven. So then they had to walk it back.”
It has always been a principal of Catholic doctrine that one need not be a Catholic to be saved, that you were not doomed just because you didn’t happen to be a Catholic. If you were good person who wasn’t Catholic, you still could be saved. No new doctrine, nothing to “walk back”.
Unfortunately, Maher and “journalists” pontificate without even doing the basic research about things they clearly don’t know.
They’d rather foolishly mock, than actually learn something.