The fact that Francis never took issue with the interview results and the fact that it apparently still presented his "thinking" per the bolded above, I'm not feeling like this atheist journalist wrote anything that was really "made up".
It would seem the above quote is of your words, 2Vermont, since they do not appear on the linked article page.
There are a number of varying reports on this scandalous 'interview' but the one thing that stands out and is not refuted by any of the reports is that Scalfari submitted a copy of his 'interview' to the Vatican and there was no reply asking him to change anything or warning him not to publish it.
Therefore, whatever it said (and we know what that was) did not raise any suspicions in the Holy See. That alone speaks volumes.
We might suppose that an ATHEIST journalist would have a prejudice of some kind, but also recall that he is an experienced journalist, so he probably knows what he can get away with in this game.
But I would agree, it would seem from all concerns that Scalfari likely did not really make anything up, for if what he wrote was not exactly what Francis had said, then it doesn't really matter, since neither Francis or any of his representatives have bothered to insist on a retraction or a correction of any kind.
It would seem that we have a pope who believes in (a) God, but not in "a Catholic God."
I like to wonder about the presence or absence of that word "a" there before God because that is the letter that some heretical sect inserted in their copy of the Bible in verse 1 of Chapter 1 of St. John's Gospel, the one our traditional priests read for the LAST Gospel most every day. It makes God into one among many, that is, polytheism, or perhaps pantheism.
This is not too far removed from Taoism, actually.
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