In another interview with his longtime atheist friend, Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis claims that Hell does not exist and that condemned souls just "disappear." This is a denial of the 2,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of Hell and the eternal existence of the soul.

The interview between Scalfari and the Pope was published March 28, 2018 in La Repubblica. The relevant section on Hell was translated by the highly respected web log, Rorate Caeli.

The interview is headlined, "The Pope: It is an honor to be called revolutionary." (Il Papa: “È un onore essere chiamato rivoluzionario." )

Scalfari says to the Pope, "Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?"

Pope Francis says, "They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls."

NFL owners have rewritten the rule on using the crown of the helmet, making it a 15-yard penalty to initiate any hit with it.

Rich McKay, chairman of the competition committee and president and CEO of the Atlanta Falcons, called it "a significant change," noting that it was a "technique too dangerous for the player doing it and the player being hit."

McKay said the tackle made by the Pittsburgh Steelers' Ryan Shazier last season that resulted in the linebacker suffering a spinal injury was not the impetus for the change. But it was an example of what needs to be eliminated from the game.

"This one technique, we saw so many hits when a player lowered his head and delivered a hit and either hurt himself or the player he was hitting," McKay said. "It was time for a change of this magnitude."

Despite a recommendation from the Navy Chaplain Appointment and Retention Eligibility Advisory Board, the Navy has denied the application of Jason Heap to become the military’s first Humanist chaplain.

It comes in the wake of strong pushback to his appointment from congressional Republicans. Republican Senator Roger Wicker and nearly two dozen of his GOP colleagues wrote a letter to the Navy last week calling Heap’s potential approval a “grave mistake.”

Wicker was quick to celebrate Heap’s rejection in a press release today:

“The Navy’s leadership has done the right thing,” Wicker said. “The appointment of an atheist to an undeniably religious position is fundamentally incompatible with atheism’s secularism. This decision preserves the distinct religious role that our chaplains carry out.”

At least one member of a North Jersey police department is selling t-shirts with the department's name and a logo some people believe is in bad taste -- given some of its officers have been accused of using excessive force in arrests.

The shirts have the Elizabeth Police Department's name and feature a "fighting Irish" man in police uniform, modeled after the University of Notre Dame's fighting leprechaun, as well as the words "House of Pain."

But Police Chief John Brennan said he's fine with it because the image is just a play on an album cover for the 1990s hip hop group House of Pain, best known for the song "Jump Around."

"The shirt has nothing to do with violence," he said in a phone interview.

NEWFOUNDLAND, Pa. (Reuters) - Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a Unification church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as “rods of iron” that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.

Women dressed in white and men in dark suits gripped the guns, which they had been urged to bring unloaded to the church in the rural Pocono Mountains, about 100 miles (160 km) north of Philadelphia. Many celebrants wore crowns - some made of bullets - while church officials dressed in flowing bright pink and white garments to go with their armaments.

Reverend Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, leader of the church after the death of his father and church founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, blessed the roughly 250 couples at the service, a church spokesman said.

The Feb. 28 marriage blessing ceremony had been planned long before a man with an AR-15 assault-style rifle massacred 17 students and school staff in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, the spokesman said.