“Let’s learn to live together, let’s be workers for peace.” These are the words of Roselyne Hamel, uttered at the funeral of her brother, Fr Jacques Hamel, at Rouen Cathedral recently. Eighty-eight-year-old Fr Jacques, assistant parish priest in the small town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy, was murdered by two 19-year-old ISIS sympathisers while he said Mass on 26 July.
Pope Francis told reporters on a flight back to Rome from World Youth Day in Poland: “I think it is not right to identify Islam with terrorism. It is not right and it is not true.” The fact is that most of the 1.6 billion Muslims (about 22 per cent of the world’s population) in our world are peace-loving people. It is significant that hundreds of Muslims attended Fr Jacques’ funeral and Masses in Italy and France as a show of solidarity and love for Christians.
