Pope Francis did not need to name the Islamic State (ISIS) in his recent remarks from Albania during which he condemned
"perverting religion" to justify murder, said Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, during an appearance Monday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"Everybody knows who he's talking about, he's talking about radical Islam," Donohue said. "We're not talking about a few people. There's always a few crackpot Catholics, Protestants and Jews. We're talking about millions and millions of people who seem to have this appetite for violence and then if everybody doesn't line up single file the way they want, including their own fellow Muslims, they're going to be killed."
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"So I commend the pope . . . I commend him for speaking out about killing in the name of God because we know that Christians are being killed in communist countries. That's what we would expect from them, but when people kill in the name of God, that's something perverse and I commend the pope for doing this because everybody in their right mind knows he's talking about these people who have hijacked Islam."
Communists want totalitarianism, Donohue said, and the church is seen as a threat to that ideology so they kill Christians, not altogether different from how the church is viewed by radical Islamists.
"In the Middle East, the church is regarded as a threat to the power of Islam because in both cases they want everybody to think single-mindedly, according to their own dictates, so one might be religious or to some extent and the other professedly atheistic, but what's at stake here is mass murder done for an ideology and the ideology of Islam. Radical Islam and communism actually have more in common than what people would seem to give notice to," he said.
Donohue said the message of Christianity must be "so threatening . . . that they want to kill us all."
Citing Pew Research Center statistics, Donohue said that some 75 percent of nations — in Africa, the Middle East, North Korea and China — persecute Christians.
But the good news, he added, is that Sunnis, Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran have all realized that ISIS "is not just another terror group" but "fanatics beyond anything we've seen in a long, long time."
"I'm somewhat optimistic if you get enough people on board who have nothing else in common maybe we can crush these people, and they need to be crushed," he said, noting that the Just War Doctrine allows for taking up arms against ISIS.
"You have to exhaust all diplomatic nonviolent means, there has to be the likely possibility that you're going to have improve the situation, it's got to be proportionate in its response, but the idea that you can dialogue with these barbarians is absolutely silly talk," he said.
"The only way you can stop them to bring about the peace is to meet them with weapons. I hate to say it but that's exactly what we're faced with."
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