«Terrorism by invoking the name of God is an attack to the conviction of many men and women who share the faith of the assassins but it is also a violence to all the faithful.”  These are the words of Armand Puig i Tàrrech, Director of the Faculty of Theology of Catolonia (Barcellona), at the panel “Terror in the name of Religion Challenges Believers” at the International Meeting “The Courage to Hope” organized by the Community of Sant’Egidio.

«Religions have various challenges on their way of approaching the Absolute and the Ineffable. One of the most difficult one is the use of the name of God to kill others, often in an indiscriminate way, believers or not, sometimes persons belonging to the same religion».

He said «the worst blasphemy that one can address to God is the one of making him the God of violence instead of recognizing him as the God of peace. The terrorist who kills, sometimes by giving his own life in the massacre, does not serve Gods will, but an ideology of death which takes God as a justification for hatred and violence.

For the theologian «No man of religion, just and merciful, can present God as Him who asks a commitment of death, a destruction of life which is a divine gift and thus Saint. The terrorist thinks that by killing innocent people he will go to paradise, but he doesn’t realize that paradise is the place of eternal life, and that it will be hard to enter there after having killed in the name of the God of life».