Pope Francis meets the head of Armenia’s Orthodox Church, Karekin II, at the Vatican last year. Photograph: Gregorio Borgia/AP

Pontiff expected to avoid use of word genocide to avoid rift between Turkey and Vatican,

Pope Francis is expected to avoid using the word “genocide” when he visits a memorial to the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians this weekend.

His notable change of tone from a statement last year that the wholesale killing of Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1923 was the “first genocide of the 20th century” is aimed at avoiding a repeat of the ensuing diplomatic rift between Turkey and the Vatican.

The pontiff’s three-day visit to Armenia, which begins on Friday, includes prayers at Tsitsernakaberd, widely known as the genocide memorial and museum, in the capital, Yerevan.

The official programme for the trip, released this week by the Vatican, refers to Tsitsernakaberd as the “memorial of the massacres”. The pope’s spokesperson said the Armenian phrase Medz Yeghern, which translates as the “great evil” or the “great catastrophe”, was preferred to genocide.

“Why is there an obsession to use the word ‘genocide’ and ask about it in all the questions?” Federico Lombardi asked journalists at a briefing on the trip this week.

“We know what happened. None of us is denying that there were horrible massacres. We recognise this. We are going to the memorial precisely to remember this but we don’t want this to become a trap of political and ideological discussions,” he said.

The phrase Medz Yeghern has been used by some world leaders, including Barack Obama.

After the pope explicitly referred to events in Armenia a century ago as a genocide, Turkey withdrew its envoy to the Vatican for 10 months.

Despite Turkey’s vehement rejection of the label – and its fury at other countries’ use of the word – president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has acknowledged the mass killings had “inhumane consequences”.

Turkey continues to deny that Armenians were systematically targeted in the wave of killing which began in April 1915. Troops of the Ottoman Empire also carried out rape, torture, the abduction of children, forced conversion to Islam and the destruction of churches over eight years. Hundreds of thousands were forced to flee.

A century on, the population of Armenia is 3.3 million, with three times as many people of Armenian descent living outside the country. The diaspora includes 1.5m in the US, 2.3m in Russia, and 18,000 in the UK.

Twenty-two countries have formally recognised the events of a century ago as a genocide, although Obama has avoided the word.

Lombardi told reporters that the purpose of the papal visit was to demonstrate Pope Francis’s closeness to the people of Armenia, and to cement ties with the Orthodox church, to which the vast majority of Armenians belong. Less than 10% of the population are Roman Catholics.

As well as visiting the Tsitsernakaberd memorial, the pope is scheduled to hold an open-air mass in Gyumri, Armenia’s second largest city, and visit the Khor Virap monastery near the closed border with Turkey.

Francis has also appeared to row back on an earlier description of the persecution and killing of Christians in the Middle East as “a form of genocide”.

Speaking to students in Rome at the weekend, he said: “I want to say clearly, I do not like it when one speaks of a genocide of Christians, for instance in the Middle East. This is reductionism. The truth is a persecution which leads Christians to have fidelity to the consistency of their faith.”

Last year, when visiting Bolivia, he said: “We are dismayed to see how in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world many of our brothers and sisters are persecuted, tortured and killed for their faith in Jesus. In this third world war, waged piecemeal, which we are now experiencing, a form of genocide is taking place, and it must end.”

Source: theguardian.com

Pope Francis calls Armenian massacre ‘genocide’

Pontiff’s comments are likely to anger Turkey, which denies that the killings 100 years ago during the fall of the Ottoman empire constituted genocide.

Pope Francis has described the mass killing of Armenians 100 years ago as a genocide, a politically explosive pronouncement that could damage diplomatic relations with Turkey.

During a special mass to mark the centenary of the mass killing, the pontiff referred to “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” of the past century. “The first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, struck your own Armenian people,” he said, quoting a declaration signed in 2001 by Pope John Paul II and Kerekin II, leader of the Armenian church.

“Bishops and priests, religious women and men, the elderly and even defenceless children and the infirm were murdered,” the pope said.

Historians estimate that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a wave of violence that accompanied the fall of the Ottoman empire. Despite the massacre being formally recognised as a genocide by Italy and a number of other countries, Turkey refuses to accept it as such.

Reports in Turkey on Sunday said the Vatican’s ambassador to Ankara had been summoned to the foreign ministry to explain the pope’s remarks.

Although the pope chose to quote a predecessor rather than speak in his own words, he told Armenians there was a duty to remember to killings.

“We recall the centenary of that tragic event, that immense and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forebears had to endure. It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honour their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester,” he said in St Peter’s Basilica.

During the mass Pope Francis also declared a 10th-century Armenian monk, St Gregory of Narek, a “doctor of the church”. The mystic and poet is celebrated for his writings, some of which are still recited each Sunday in Armenian churches.

The pope was joined at the Vatican by a number of Armenian dignitaries, including the president, Serž Sargsyan, and the head of the Armenian Apostolic church, Karekin II.

Theo van Lint, a Calouste Gulbenkian professor of Armenian studies at the University of Oxford, said allowing Armenian leaders to speak in St Peter’s Basilica was a strategic move.

“I think it’s very important to realise he gave space to the leaders, the heads of the Armenian church and Armenian Catholics, to fully give their view of events. It’s very clear that the pope accepts that it is a genocide,” van Lint told the Guardian.

He said the pontiff’s decision to refer to the mass killing of Armenians along with crimes perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism gave the Vatican’s “highest sanction” to genocide recognition.

Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, a researcher on Armenian history and culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said the ceremony demonstrated the pope’s efforts to put periphery Christian groups at the centre of the Catholic church.

“This is the first time that Armenia is the centre of attention of Catholic life and the Christian world. It’s meant to draw attention to the Christian east,” he said.

Francis’s use of the word “genocide” was unlikely to change relations between Armenia and Turkey, Dorfmann-Lazarev said, although it would raise diplomatic concerns at the Vatican.

Pope Francis to visit genocide memorial in Armenia

Vatican Pope Francis calls Armenian slaughter ‘genocide’ (Video)