Stop Making Excuses For Militant Islam, Pope Francis

Stop Making Excuses For Militant Islam, Pope Francis


Pope Francis does a disservice to his followers and world leaders, who would look to him for the confidence and moral backing to call out Islamic terrorism and face it head-on.

On Sunday, Pope Francis responded to questions from reporters about why he won’t call out Islamic violence or reference Islamic terrorism when responding to terrorist attacks like the one that took the life of French priest Jacques Hamel last week. The pope denied any associations between Islam and violence and said “If I speak of Islamic violence, I should speak of Catholic violence.” By speaking this way, he does a disservice to his followers, and world leaders, who would look to him for the confidence and moral backing to call out Islamic terrorism and face it head-on.

According to Pope Francis, every religion has the potential for violence, including Catholicism. This, of course, is true, because every single human person has the potential to do wrong, as Catholicism itself teaches. So we’ve seen violence play out in the history of the Catholic Church. But that doesn’t mean that today some religions’ adherents don’t encourage it more than others, or have a greater potential for violence. Context and culture matters.


The Islamist ideology and doctrine terrorists follow today wasn’t created out of thin air in the past few years or decades. It has roots in an early interpretation of Islam dating from the first centuries after Mohammed’s revelations. In the world of Islamic jurisprudence, it’s just as legitimate as other interpretations of the faith. But as far as I know, there is no early church interpretation of Christianity still popular today that promotes violence like Wahhabism or Salafism does.

Islam Has Ties to Violence, Plain and Simple

The pope also described reading about murders Catholics have perpetrated. Therefore, in his convoluted reasoning, Francis surmises he couldn’t possibly draw a distinction between Catholic violence and Islamic violence. But what the pope misses, either intentionally or through naïveté, is the crucial difference between committing a crime and happening to belong to a given religion, and committing a crime in the name of that religion. No one is claiming that every murder, assault, and robbery a Muslim perpetrates is an example of Islamic radicalism. But, as Europe is discovering, a significant minority of Muslims commit violence explicitly in the name of Islam.

Pope Francis apparently can’t see the difference between crimes that share a single motivation and those that don’t. According to French officials, there are approximately 11,000 suspected Islamists in France who are on what they call their “Fiche S” list. This means there are thousands of people in France alone who might be willing to kill, not randomly, but in the name of Islam.

Islamic terrorism is more threatening than the unconnected crimes Christians might commit because it’s based on shared beliefs. This also makes it more preventable. We know what radical Islamists believe, and in many cases we know who teaches them, where they’re radicalized, and how they coordinate. It all revolves around a certain interpretation of their religion. But if we ignore those signs, as Pope Francis does, we will be at a loss to stop them.


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