Cardinal Dolan: Islamic State is perversion of Islam, as IRA was perversion of Catholicism
March 04, 2015
The Islamic State represents “a particularly perverted form of Islam,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York has said.
“These are not pure, these are not real Muslims,” the cardinal said in an interview with CNN.
Cardinal Dolan compared the relationship between the Islamic faith and the Islamic State with that between the Irish Republican Army and the Catholic Church. “They were baptized,” he said of the Irish militants. “They had a Catholic identity.” But the violence that they employed “was a perversion of everything the Church stood for.”
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Posted by: R. Spanier (Catholic Canadian) -
Mar. 07, 2015 12:40 AM ET USA
If ISIS members aren't 'real Muslims', what about those who don't belong to ISIS but support it? "Some estimate that as many as 11 per cent of Turks support the group (ISIS), amounting to around 8 million people. Hugh Pope, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis group, has noted that 'internal government polling showed more sympathy for Islamic State in the Sunni constituency of the ruling Justice and Development Party [AKP].'" (Maclean’s, Oct. 8/14)
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Posted by: Frodo1945 -
Mar. 05, 2015 4:50 PM ET USA
Well, at least he only went back to the 1920s, (not to the crusades) in his attempt to show some equivalence. Even so, a very poor analogy. The IRA was a political beast, not a religious one. Too bad he didn't go back to early 600s and recount the spread of Islam through war and killing.
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Posted by: brenda22890 -
Mar. 05, 2015 1:13 PM ET USA
I really wish that people who perceived as speaking for the Church would spend some time reading history, less time jumping on the politically correct bandwagon, before they speak.
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Posted by: ElizabethD -
Mar. 04, 2015 6:46 PM ET USA
I am reading Warren Carroll's History of Christendom, and it actually seems like Muhammed and the early Muslims did basically what this current lot of barbarians are doing. Whereas, Jesus and the early Christians did not act like the IRA.
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Posted by: shrink -
Mar. 04, 2015 5:32 PM ET USA
The good Cardinal can certainly speak with authority on Catholicism, and his views are broadly consistent with Catholic history, which shows a pacifist group for its first several hundred years. The same cannot be said of Islam which has had spasms of war from its inception.
