While speaking during a “Meditation for Peace” last week, Argentinian Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said there is no doubt that the Quran advocates for violence – but this interpretation can only be clarified from within the Muslim community.

CNA/EWTN News is reporting on the comments made by Bishop Sanchez on August 5 in which he stressed that while few Muslims are terrorists, there’s no denying the calls for violence which can be found in the Quran.

“It would be naive to pretend that there are not certain episodes in the Koran and the Hadith that may lend themselves to a violent interpretation,” he said.

But “how the Muslim community worldwide can give a peaceful hermeneutic to these passages is a task which I imagine will be made more difficult with too much pressure ‘from outside’,” which is why he “wouldn’t dream of telling Muslims how to interpret their faith.”

However, “those who want to work towards that end from within will find a strong ally and friend in the Catholic Church, ready to accompany on the way.”

The Bishop’s comments came just days after Pope Francis’ July 31 press conference on his return from World Youth Day in Krakow during which he said that it is not right to equate Islam with violence.

“This is not right and it is not true,” the pope said at the time.

Bishop Sánchez agrees, but notes how the “religious-inspired terrorism” of the last few decades has been “propagated by a few individuals who insist that they alone have the correct interpretation of Islam.”

These individuals persist “in the face of the billion other adherents of Islam who testify to a tolerant religion which does not recognize the legitimacy of the actions of these few wicked individuals,” he said.

Most Muslims are not guilty of the violence that is perpetrated in the name of their religion, he said, adding that the “overwhelming majority” of the victims of terrorist groups in the Middle East are Muslim.

“It therefore falls upon all leaders of moral authority in these times to do all they can to calm an increasingly tense situation – made all the more tense by the actions of the few,” Bishop Sanchez said.

In light of continued terrorism around the world, “every single person, irrespective of personal faith, has the responsibility to speak – and to act – with the utmost prudence,” Bishop Sanchez said, “only ever appealing to our neighbor’s most noble sentiments and never to his worst instincts.”

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