Extremism challenges our pluralism - Religious intolerance

POPE FRANCIS yesterday devoted his Easter Urbi et Orbi address to one of the world’s escalating and seemingly intractable problems — religious persecution and intolerance.

Preaching to 50,000 people in a rain-sodden St Peter’s Square, the pontiff made an appeal for peace in Syria, Iraq, the Holy Land, and other regions caught in the terrible grip of war. He made particular reference to the 150 or so students massacred at Garissa University in Kenya last week, where al-Shabaab terrorists asked students whether they were Christian or Muslim and murdered those who said they were Christian.

Religious persecution, an irrational, animal hatred, is an age-old human weakness but it does seem that, as the West becomes ever more committed to pluralism, and the tolerance and protection that enshrines, those who believe in the absolute, unquestioned primacy of their own theocracy become more intolerant of those who do not share their beliefs.