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ISIS is no more Muslim than the Irish Republican Army was Catholic, the Archbishop of New York has said.
During an interview on CNN, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said: “The IRA claimed to be Catholic. They were baptised. They had a Catholic identity.”
But, he continued, “what they were doing was a perversion of everything the Church stood for”.
The cardinal said the Islamic State movement was in the midst of a “systematic, well-choreographed, very well-focussed attempt to eradicate the ancient Christian population of the Mid-East”.
“You know the parallel I’ve drawn?” he added.
He went on to add that the Irish bishops “to their immense credit”, said at the time that the IRA attackers who targeted homes or military installations were not Catholics.
Cardinal Dolan said that while the killers of Islamic State are Muslim in his eyes, they belong to a “particularly perverted form of Islam”.
“These are not pure, these are not real Muslims,” he explained.
“Now what we need and what Pope Francis has led the world in saying, is we need the temperate, moderate, genuine forces of Islam to rise up and say this: they do not represent us.
“Now, that’s beginning to happen. God can bring good out of evil.”
Cardinal Dolan was expanding on comments he had made in New York media last month, when he had made a similar analogy.
The Ulster Unionist Party’s Tom Elliott told the Belfast Newsletter he questioned just how far the Catholic Church really had gone in denouncing IRA violence.
Asked whether he believed Cardinal Dolan’s reference to the Catholic Church’s anti-IRA stance rings true, he said: “On some occasions it does.
“However, I never knew the Catholic Church to not bury a [Provisional IRA] person and some of them allowed, obviously, those terrorist or paramilitary funerals at their church.
“So while they did go some way, they had options to go much further.”
Sources
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