Pope Francis: Armenians were persecuted just for being Christians

September 8, 2015 By administrator

Armenians were the first nation to convert to Christianity and were persecuted just for being Christians, Pope Francis said after Mass on Monday morning celebrated with Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians, His Beatitude Gregory Peter XX Ghabroyan.

“The Armenian people were persecuted, chased away from their homeland, helpless, in the desert.” This story – he observed – began with Jesus: what people did, “to Jesus, has during the course of history been done to His body, which is the Church,” His Holiness said, the Vatican Radio reported.

“I would like, on this day of our first Eucharist, as brother Bishops, dear brother Bishops and Patriarch and all of you Armenian faithful and priests, to embrace you and remember this persecution that you have suffered, and to remember your holy ones, your many saints who died of hunger, in the cold, under torture, [cast] into the wilderness only for being Christians.”

Pope Francis remembered the broader persecution of Christians in the present day that continues amid “the complicit silence of many powerful world.”

Pope celebrates Santa Marta Mass with Armenian Patriarch

September 7, 2015 By administrator

2015-09-07 Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis’ morning Mass in the chapel of the Santa Marta residence on Monday was an extraordinary occasion: it saw the recently-elected Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians, His Beatitude Gregory Peter XX Ghabroyan, concelebrate the liturgy with the Holy Father, and exchange with the Pope the concrete sign of ecclesial communion par excellence.

A statement from the Armenian Patriarchate describes the scene during the Liturgy: “[At the Rite of Communion], the Holy Father … elevates the paten with the Body of Christ and offers it to the Patriarch. The two hold the Host high with their four hands. The Holy Father then raises the chalice with the Blood of Christ, offers it to the Patriarch, and they with their four hands keep it elevated. After a moment of silence, the Holy Father offers the Body of Christ, and together they communicate. The Holy Father takes the Blood of Christ from the chalice, then offers it to the Patriarch.”

“‘Communion’ is a concept held in great honor in the early Church and also today,” the statement explains. “[I]t does not mean some vague sentiment, but an organic reality, which requires a legal form and that is at the same time animated by charity.

The statement goes on to say, “The Ecclesiastica communio, which the Holy Father Francis granted to His Beatitude Gregory Peter XX with Letter of July 25, now finds expression in the exchange of the Sacred Species, which confirms the Eucharistic communion between the Bishop and the Church of Rome, who presides in charity, and the Patriarchal Church of Cilicia of the Armenians, through its Pater et Caput.

Source: news.va

Pope urges Catholic parishes to take in refugees

September 6, 2015 By administrator

Pope Francis is asking faithful throughout Europe to shelter refugees fleeing “death from war and hunger.”

Francis said that the Vatican’s two parishes are taking in two families of refugees. He gave no details as he addressed tens of thousands of people in St Peter’s Square.

He said it’s not enough to say “have courage, hang in there” to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are on the march toward what he called “life’s hope.”

He called on every Catholic parish, convent, monastery and sanctuary in Europe to shelter a family, and asked bishops throughout Europe to urge their dioceses to do the same.

Pope Francis touches on Armenian Genocide again

June 22, 2015 By administrator

by Tatevik Shahunyan

During a Sunday service in Turin on June 21, Pope Francis cited what he called the “great tragedy of Armenia” in the last century. “So many died. I don’t know the figure, more than a million, certainly. But where were the great powers then? They were looking the other way,” Associated Press quotes the Pope as saying.

The source says that Pope Francis denounced what he calls the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating Jews, Christians, homosexuals and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II. He also decried the deaths of Christians in concentration camps in Russia under the Stalin dictatorship, which followed the war.

To recall, in April, the Pope angered Turkey when he referred to the slaughter of Armenians by Turkish Ottomans as “genocide.” Turkey condemned the Pope’s remarks and recalled its ambassador from Vatican. Following the Pope’s remarks, a number of foreign countries’ parliaments recognized the Armenian Genocide.

Pope approves new office to investigate bishops on sexual abuse

June 10, 2015 By administrator

Pope Francis Wednesday approved an unprecedented Vatican department to judge bishops accused of covering up or not preventing sexual abuse of minors, meeting a key demand by victims’ groups, Reuters reports.

A statement said the department would come under the auspices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal arm, “to judge bishops with regard to crimes of the abuse of office when connected to the abuse of minors.”

Victims groups have for years been urging the Vatican to establish clear procedures to make bishops more accountable for abuse in their dioceses, even if they were not directly responsible for it.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told reporters that the bishops could also be judged if they had failed to take measures to prevent sexual abuse of minors.

Putin to visit Pope Francis on June 10

June 4, 2015 By administrator

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with Pope Francis on June 10 at the Vatican, with conflicts in Syria and Ukraine likely to top the Holy See’s agenda, The Associated Press reported.
Putin last called on Francis on Nov. 25, 2013.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev Federico Lombardi, said Thursday the meeting would take place in the afternoon of June 10; Putin is expected to visit Russia’s pavilion at the Expo world’s fair in Milan, where June 10 has been slated as Russia’s national day.

After nearly a half-century of hostility between the Vatican and the Kremlin during the Cold War, a major breakthrough came just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, met the Polish-born pontiff, John Paul II.

After a 2009 visit by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia and the Holy See upgraded their diplomatic relations to full-fledged ties, with ambassadors.

Long-running tensions in Russia between Orthodox and Catholic faithful in Russia preventedPope Benedict XVI and before him John Paul from achieving their long-sought dreams of a Russian pilgrimage and meeting with the Russian patriarch.

Tellingly, Putin didn’t invite Francis to visit during his 2013 visit — one of the few world leaders who have not extended an invitation to the enormously popular pope during an audience.
Francis has sought to enlist Orthodox leaders in his campaign to condemn attacks on Christians by Islamic militants in the Middle East. But he has trod lightly with Russia over Ukraine, denouncing the casualties and calling for a cease-fire to hold, but not laying any blame on Moscow.

Italian PM: Pope’s statement on #ArmenianGenocide was absolutely righteous

April 17, 2015 By administrator

The Pope’s statement on the recognition of the Armenian Genocide was absolutely righteous, and if Turkey wants to join the European Union (EU), it must adopt the European values, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said at the meeting with the students at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C, News.am reports citing Italy’s La Stampa daily.

“I support Turkey’s European integration,” Renzi said and added: “But Ankara needs to make a decision and accept that it shares our values.”

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

April 12, 2015 By administrator

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.

Sunday LIVE FROM THE BASILICA SAINT-PIERRE ROME Pope Francis celebrates a Mass in memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide

April 11, 2015 By administrator

Sunday morning at 9 am, the Pope will celebrate Mass François in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome on the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide in the presence of the President of the Republic of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan and His Holiness Karekin II, Catholicos of All Armenians. Mass will be celebrated in Armenian rite.

That same day at 22:15 on France 5, Armenian Genocide, the 1915 spectrum, a poignant documentary based on the testimonies of Turks whose history is linked to massacres of 1915. With Hasan Cemal, journalist and writer, grand-son of Cemal Pacha plannificateurs -one of the genocide-which, after a personal journey, married the Armenian cause and is now working to recognize the genocide. There also Fethiye Cetin, lawyer and human rights which, in adulthood, discovered the Armenian roots that her grandmother had hidden to survive when she was a child. She then led us in his footsteps in the village where the latter spent his childhood in an attempt to reconstruct its history. The camera goes to meet those who are trying to give a place to the Armenian community in the current Turkish society and into the museum erected in Yerevan, Armenia, in memory of the victims. But it also crosses Turks still deny activism with the reality of a genocidal massacre. A moving panorama of the weight of a controversial Turkish past.

Taking a leaf from the Armenians’ book – The Telegraph

February 28, 2015 By administrator

Pope Francis, named a great Armenian saint, Gregory of Narek (pictured above), as a Doctor of the Church

Sacred Mysteries: the ancient civilisation of Armenia remains exotic and unknown in the West, but a holy monk from lake Van has just been declared a Doctor of the Church

By Christopher Howse

There’s a little book on my shelf that I can’t read. It is in Armenian, and I cannot even make out the attractive curly alphabet. Byron, by all accounts, did rather better, taking lessons in the language, from 1816, at the monastery where my book was printed.

This is at San Lazzaro, an island in Venice, between San Giorgio and the Lido. It was granted to the Armenian monks in 1717. The little community was brought there in that year by their first abbot Mechitar of Sebaste, after whom the monks are called Mechitarists.

This monastery was of Armenian Catholics, in other words, Armenians who recognised the primacy of the Pope. The majority of Armenians belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Armenians are fond of telling you that theirs was the first country to adopt Christianity, in 301, thanks to St Gregory the Illuminator. Armenia, with its Indo-European language unrecognisably related to ours, has a proud civilisation, but to say that its history in recent centuries has been difficult is an understatement.

I was thinking about the Armenians because, in the bright winter sun on Tuesday, I stumbled across the Armenian church in Kensington, St Sarkis, its white Portland stone shining exotically amid the red-brick mansion flats around it. It was built in 1922 in memory of the philanthropist Calouste Gulbenkian’s parents.

The Prince of Wales visited the Armenians in London a few weeks ago at their nearby church of St Yeghiche as part of his efforts to draw attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East. He mentioned the destruction last November (by Islamists of the al-Nusra Front) of the Armenian church at Deir ez-Zor in Syria. It had been built as a memorial to the thousands of Armenian refugees from Turkey who died there in the second decade of the 20th century.

With these thoughts in mind, I discovered that Pope Francis had last Saturday named a great Armenian saint, Gregory of Narek (pictured above), as a Doctor of the Church. That is a rare title, there having been only another 35 in the history of the Church – people like St Jerome or St Athanasius.

St Gregory (950-1003) lived as a monk at Narek, near lake Van in what is now Turkey. A little more than 1,000 years later, the great monastery with its conical domes in the Armenian style was destroyed and the Armenians living around it killed.

St Gregory of Narek’s best-known work, the Book of Prayer, also called the Lamentations, might have been written as a meditation on that disaster and the episodess of martyrdom that have punctuated Armenia’s history. The saint’s aim is to bring God’s mercy to bear on mankind so that it might share in God’s nature. “This book will cry out in my place, with my voice, as if it were me,” he wrote. “May unspeakable faults be confronted and the traces of evil wrung out.”
Last year Pope Francis met the Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Karekin II, and spoke about martyrdom as a way of reuniting the Church. He had sketched out his thoughts before by remarking: “In some countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross or having a Bible; and before they kill them they do not ask them whether they are Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic, or Orthodox.”

In St Gregory of Narek’s day, the Armenian Church, having followed its own path after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was presumed by the Orthodox and by Western Catholics to be monophysite in teaching, with false beliefs about the nature of Jesus as God and man. It could hardly have been the case in practice, and the Catholic recognition of St Gregory and other Armenian saints demonstrated a shared faith. The proclamation of him as a doctor sets the seal on that unity of belief. In these murderous times, Christians in the East need all the unity of spirit they can muster.