The pope made the statement during a press conference held aboard a plane taking him back to Rome following a four-day visit to Poland.
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Reporters asked Pope Francis about Islam and terrorism during his flight home from World Youth Day. The love and adoration of money is a “basic terrorism against all of humanity” he said, and has replaced love between humans.
“If I talk about Islamic violence, then I also have to talk of Catholic violence”.
Francis weighed in with his view on gender and what he said was that of the emeritus pontiff while meeting privately last week with bishops from Poland during his pilgrimage there.
It means a lot to hear His Holiness Pope Francis tell the world that it is wrong to identify Islam with terrorism.
POPE Francis has condemned the habit of linking Islam with terrorism, saying that “nearly all religions” have a “small group of fundamentalists”. “We have them too”, he said.
The Pope expressed his belief that every religion has its fundamentalist groups, including Catholicism.
The Pope’s initial comment came in speaking about the murder July 26 of an elderly priest during Mass in a Catholic church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, France.
There has been an accelerating pattern of attacks this year linked to ISIS in Europe and beyond – from Turkey to Bangladesh, the United States to Indonesia.
He went on, “I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I look at the papers I see violence here in Italy – someone killing his girlfriend, someone killing his mother-in-law”.
“It’s not true and it’s not correct (to say) Islam is terrorism”, he told journalists aboard the papal plane during the return journey from a trip to Poland.
He asked God to “keep in peace the world and its people, to keep far away from it the devastating wave of terrorism, to restore friendship and instill in the hearts of Your creatures the gift of trust and of readiness to forgive”.
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They claimed the religious figurehead “has struggled against reality” in his attempts to portray Islam as a religion of peace. The pope added that people who chose to join extremist groups, such as ISIS, make such choices because they “have been left empty” of ideals, work and values.
