On July 31st, Pope Francis responded to criticism that he did not mention any connections between the horrific slaying of a Catholic priest in Normandy and Islamist terror, instead preferring to call the act as simply one of "absurd violence".
"There is a small group of extremists in practically every religion," the pontiff said on a plane ride back from his recent visit to Poland. "I don't like speaking about Islamic violence...you read about someone who's killed his girlfriend or his mother-in-law, and these are violent, baptized Catholics. If I speak about 'Islamic' violence should I speak about 'Catholic' violence too?"
That depends, are the people killing their girlfriends shouting verses from the Bible and pledging allegiance to the Vatican?
I'm not Catholic, but even still, I hate criticizing Pope Francis. It's like criticizing that sweet old lady at the end of your street who hands out hard candies to toddlers. He's too nice, ten times the Christian most people will ever be, and if you say one word against him, you'll just look like a jerk.
But that being said, these statements are part of a troubling trend in the Pope's speech that never seem to want to address the international problem of Islamist violence. For example, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January of 2015, the Pope responded by saying, if someone "says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch," referring to the satirical magazine's insulting cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as the catalyst for the attack.
Although the Pope condemned the attack in the same response, I was still more than a little frustrated by it. Charlie Hebdo has also made insulting cartoons about the Catholic Church. I'm sure if Catholics "punched" back the way the perpetrators of the January attack did, the Pope would not have been nearly as defensive.
In May of this year, the Pope told French Catholic newspaperLa Croix that, "It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam...However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew's Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same ideas of conquest."
Remember that touching scene in the New Testament where Jesus beheads the Roman centurion after saying he had the "greatest faith in all of Israel?" Because I sure don't!
In some ways, yes, I can certainly understand where the Pope is coming from. He doesn't want to appear too belligerent to the Islamic world, because his statements may act as fuel for Islamophobic attacks on the one hand, and justification for ISIS to attack Catholics on the other.
But the recent Normandy attack shows that Islamists will attack churches with no provocation. In fact, according to The Daily Mail, the church that was attacked was on a hit list of Catholic Churches found in an apartment of Islamic extremists months earlier. It is uncertain if the Normandy attackers had any connection to this hit list, but the coincidence is chilling.
But even if it wasn't, it's about time the Pope (and the rest of Western Christianity, for that matter), take their focus away from Europe and see the broader context of what is happening. All across the world, Christians are under attack by Islamic radicals. Whether it's the kidnapping and forced conversion of Christian girls by Boko Haram, the kidnapping and murder of Syriac priests by ISIS, or the systematic attempt to eliminate Christianity in Saudi Arabia, Christians across the Islamic world are under constant and existential danger. What happened in Normandy is all too common in a country such as Egypt, in which the nation's sizeable Coptic Christian minority has been facing increasing violence at the hand of Islamist mobs.
While the Pope and other Western religious leaders can go on as much as they like about violence existing in all religions, or that not all Muslims are terrorists, they must face up to one inescapable fact: Virtually all of the violence directed towards Christians today comes from one religion-- Islam.
By refusing to address this fact, the Pope doesn't set the enormous crisis Christians around the world face today in the proper context, thus blurring the lines of the discussion, and leaving his flock in the West confused about the nature of the problem.
What would help the Christians of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan more, vague platitudes about the evils of religious persecution, or concrete criticisms of the political and religious establishments of those countries, decrying them for letting Islamic fundamentalism get so out of hand?
While Westerners today can quibble about the true magnitude of the Islamic threat to Europe and America, this truth remains undeniable: The threat to Christians in Africa and the Middle East is anything but exaggerated. If Christians in the West refuse to understand the true nature of the threat facing their brothers and sisters in the East, the oldest communities in their religion will become extinct.
Shouldn't the Pope's voice be the clearest on this fact?