SCALPED-FARI
Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari was perhaps best known for conducting a number of dialogues in his dotage with Pope Francis, on Francis’s faith, Scalfari’s secularism, and the state of the Catholic Church. Some of the snippets attracted wide media attention – firstly in 2014, when Scalfari revealed that Francis said in one interview that about 2% of the Catholic Church’s priests were paedos. Several years later, Scalfari unveiled the bombshell that the Pope asserted Hell didn’t exist, causing that same 2% to exhale a sigh of relief. Frankie boy immediately refuted the claim, making the 2% go “oh shit”.
Scalfari’s chats with the Pope were merely a bookend to a long career that reshaped Italian journalism. As chief editor of magazine L’Espresso in the 60s, his dogged investigative approach uncovered in 1967 an attempted coup from several years before. He maintained his journalistic tenets when co-founding La Repubblica in 1976, which quickly sold like hotcakes in Italy for its punchier leftist format in contrast to the more rigid Corriere della Sera. His La Repubblica weekly column remained a force of conversation even after he retired as editor, and was noted for its merciless takedowns of Berlusconi. It is testament to Scalfari’s stature in Italian media that even a sworn nemesis like Mr. Bunga Bunga issued condolences. Scalfari was 98 and a unique for Pazuzu XP.
Eugenio Scalfari
6 April 1924 – 14 July 2022, aged 98
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