Pope Francis on Sunday said he won’t label Islam as “terrorist” because that would be unfair and not true.
Reporters aboard the papal plane flying him home after visit to Poland asked him why he never uses the world “Islam” to describe terrorism or other violence, the pope replied he won’t do that because “it’s not right to identify Islam with violence. It’s not right and it’s not true.”
Francis told them: “I believe that in every religion there is always a little fundamentalist group. I don’t like to talk of Islamic violence because every day, when I go through the newspapers, I see violence, this man who (kills) his girlfriend, another who kills his mother-in-law,” he said, in an apparent reference to crime news in predominantly Catholic Italy. “And these are baptized Catholics. If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence.
“In Islam, not all are violent, not all the Catholics are violent. It’s like a fruit salad, everything’s in there."
Noting he had spoken with imams, he concluded: “I know how they think, they are looking for peace.” As for ISIS, he said, the Islamic State group “presents itself with a violent identity card, but that’s not Islam.”
Francis spoke on the day when Muslims in France and Italy flocked to mass in a show of interfaith solidarity following a string of extremist attacks threatening to sharpen religious divides across Europe, including last week's murder of an 85-year-old priest by ISIS terrorists in Normandy.
