Paçacı was recalled last April to Ankara over Pope Francis’ comments describing the killings of Armenians by the Ottomans a century ago as “genocide.”
On April 12, 2015, Pope Francis marked the 100th anniversary of the killings of Armenians during World War I by calling it “the first genocide of the 20th century,” a pronouncement that drew ire from the Turkish government.
Turkey summoned the Vatican’s ambassador in Ankara on the same day over the pope’s comments.
Turkey, a majority of whose population is Muslim, accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes with Ottoman soldiers beginning in 1915, when Armenia was part of the empire ruled from İstanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.