Is the Pope devious, deluded or a dunce?

I've asked myself this many times during the last few years and I ask it again.  The Pope has given yet another of his ill-timed and ill-judged interviews to a 91 year old Italian journalist who refuses to record the conversation.

This time the Pope apparently told him that the principle of the admission of the divorced [and remarried] to the Sacraments had been accepted by the Synod.  Specifically he said:

This is bottom line result, the de facto appraisals are entrusted to the confessors, but at the end of faster or slower paths, all the divorced who ask will be admitted.

Now I've no way of knowing if the Pope actually said this or if his favorite journalist, Italian editor Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica simply made it all up.  It seems very unlikely to me that he would make it up entirely.  But who knows?  Only the Pope really.

If this was the first time you might say, "well the Holy Father will have learned his lesson - he'll not do that again".  But is isn't the first time, nor even the second time.

So I ask again, is the Pope devious, deluded or a dunce?  I think we know the answer.

As for poor Father Lombardi, Holy See Press Office - can there be a worse job for anyone with integrity?  This time he says:

"As has already occurred in the past, Scalfari refers in quotes what the Pope supposedly told him, but many times it does not correspond to reality, since he does not record nor transcribe the exact words of the Pope, as he himself has said many times. So it is clear that what is being reported by him in the latest article about the divorced and remarried is in no way reliable and cannot be considered as the Pope's thinking."

Plentyof wriggle room there.