Pope Francis says it is wrong to identify Islam with violence and that social injustice and idolatry of money are among the prime causes of terrorism.
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Pope Francis celebrates a mass at conclusion of the World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland, July 31, 2016.
“Terrorism grows when there is no other option, and as long as the world economy has at its center the god of money and not the person, ” the pope told reporters late Sunday as he returned to the Vatican from a five-day visit in Poland. He said that if he speaks of violent Islam, he’d have to speak of violent Catholicism, since Catholics kill, too.
“I believe that in every religion there is always a little fundamentalist group”. “If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence”. “Every day in the newspapers I see violence in Italy, someone kills his girlfriend, another kills his mother-in-law, and these are baptized Catholics”.
The pontiff was speaking after Muslims attended Catholic mass in churches around France on Sunday in solidarity and sorrow following the murder of the priest last Tuesday, whose throat was slit at the altar of his church.
“You can kill with the tongue as well as the knife”, he said, in an apparent reference to a rise in populist parties fuelling racism and xenophobia. “I know it unsafe to say this but terrorism grows when there is no other option and when money is made a god and it, instead of the person, is put at the center of the world economy”, he said.
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“I ask myself how many young people that we Europeans have left devoid of ideals, who do not have work”.
