Francis responded that the characterization of Islam as violent is untrue and that violence committed by extremist groups such as the Islamic State should not be attributed to the religion as a whole.
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Pope Francis answered reporters questions on board a flight from Krakow, Poland, to Rome, at the end of his 5-day trip to southern Poland, July 31.
“I believe that in every religion there is always a little fundamentalist group”, he said.
God, said Francis in his final homily of the pilgrimage, “demands of us real courage, the courage to be more powerful than evil, by loving everyone, even our enemies”. “Every day in the newspapers I see violence in Italy, someone kills his girlfriend, another kills his mother-in-law, and these are baptised Catholics”, he said.
Two Muslim men, armed with knives, burst into the church during mass and slit the priest’s throat. “It is not right and it is not true”. “If I speak of Islamic violence, I have to speak of Catholic violence”. We don’t know what the result will be; but be attentive to what justice decides.
He told reporters the situation was like “a mixed fruit salad” and that there were ‘violent people in all religions’.
Yet Rosen also said “it is a bit disingenuous not to acknowledge that much of contemporary terrorism is perpetrated in the name of Islam”.
“I had a long conversation with the grand imam of Al-Azhar”, he said. The key point is specifically killing non-Christians in order to impose Christian law and rule upon them.
The pope said aboard his flight that it was wrong to identify a small fundamentalist sect with an entire religion.
The Vatican said Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2016 Francis “after intense prayer and mature reflection” chose to set up the commission, with 12 members, six men and six women, including priests, nuns and laywomen.
Instead, the Pope said, that those who choose to enter fundamentalists groups, such as the ISIS, do so because “they have been left empty” of ideals, work and values.
The pope went on to suggest that capitalism is another form of terrorism: “When you place at the center of the world economy the ‘God of Money, ‘ that’s terrorism against all humanity”.
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Still, as theologian James Ball writes for U.S. Catholic, to his knowledge, no other pope has been as explicit in denying any inherent connection between Islam and violence as Francis was in his 2013 apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel”.
