Australia’s highest Catholic priest, the Archbishop of Sydney, wants us all to read the Koran and judge for ourselves how peaceful Mohammed’s message is: Pell challenges Islam - o ye, of little tolerant faith. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, said reading the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, was vital “because the challenge of Islam will be with us for the remainder of our lives - at least”. …

Dr Pell said the September 11 terrorist attacks had been his personal wake-up call to understand Islam better. He had tried to reconcile claims that Islam was a faith of peace with those that suggested the Koran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims.

While there was room for optimism in fruitful dialogue between faiths and the common human desire for peace, a pessimistic response began “with the Koran itself”. Errors of facts, inconsistencies, anachronisms and other defects were not unknown to scholars but difficult for Muslims to debate openly, he said.

“In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.”

Last year, Dr Pell courted controversy when he drew a link between Islam and communism. His speech on Islam and Western democracies was delivered in Florida on February 4 but only appeared on the archdiocese’s website on Wednesday.

Dr Pell said every nation and every religion, including Catholicism, had “crimes in their histories”. In the same way, Islam could not airbrush its “shadows”.

Claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities were largely mythical and he wondered about the possibility of theological development in Islam when the Koran was said to come directly from God. “Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited,” he said.