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.”