Pope Francis is not the first "Catholic" to embrace pan-salvation. (Can hardly wait to get to the NEW "earth" and dine with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and other mass murders who as part of the "tutti" will be winging away in "good times are rolling" Paradise.) I will leave this odd Francis-statement for others to comment. I would like to point out a couple of other implications contained it the Pope's …More
Pope Francis is not the first "Catholic" to embrace pan-salvation. (Can hardly wait to get to the NEW "earth" and dine with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and other mass murders who as part of the "tutti" will be winging away in "good times are rolling" Paradise.) I will leave this odd Francis-statement for others to comment. I would like to point out a couple of other implications contained it the Pope's words, relative to which I can understand the Pope's pan-salvationism.
The Pope has totally immantized God qua being actually infinite. Is the "face to face with Him" to be taken literally. Given the Pope literalistic interpretations of about heaven being a "place" in which mankind will be in a permanent "state" of whooping-it-up (my expresion for the pope's "joy"), I am inclined to tale the Pope literally. At that "place" we humans will encounter God "face to face"! If God in his eternal infinity can be at a "place", then I ask if God too will have eyes and ears and a nose and a chin (hopefully without beard). I am not talking here of God incarnated, but of God Himself as infinite. If God Himself can fit into a "place" (localizeable by point coordinates), then, well God can, indeed, in Himself literally have a "face" (I am dying to know what color God's in Himself "skin" will be).
The above paragraph may sound silly. However, the sillyness follows from Pope F's exclusion of the transcendent and, hence, hetero-geneity to all finite realities. The Pope has treated God in homogenous terms, i.e., as a SUPERFACE, but a face with point coordinates of a "place". This type of thinking transforms the visio mystica as a profounder expression for a "face-to-face" into quite finite terms and so heaven is presented as a utopian (= the "new" of the new world) "place". Note that the Pope does not say that the world we are living on now will pass away (e.g., thermic death of the universe), but only its "shape". The Pope does not means by "shape" that the new earth will be square like dice, rather that it will profer "superabunance" (we can all hog down on parties feasting on all those killed animals). All will have suberabunance for a superconsumption (and I add without a electricity bill at the end of the month, not to mention no constipation after hogging down a big "Thanks-Giving" meal with a superabundance of beer) No work, all play! I am not just poking fun at the Pope's primiticity of thinking, rather noting some features that even a heavenly RE-shaped world of justice must face.
My comment is already too long. I reduce my opposition to the Pope's words by noting that I accept an infinite God as implying heterogeneity and the Pope speaks in terms of homogeneity. If heaven is but the re-shaped earth upon which ALL (think of all the billions of humans throughout time) have to fit in and to pass their days in superabundant joy, then it would be a downer if if one human, not to speak of millions, were running around in the heavenly "place" where ALL will be and yet, those not haveing been saved, experiencr it as "hell of a place". Such hellish people would ruin the "having a good time" day for us less-than-all saved, even if we would be singing like a papal Pentecostal. So it should be obvious that Francis-logic must have "tutti" saved for a world not free of sin, but of injustice.