MONEY SPENT ON CHURCHES IS ENOUGH TO HAVE STATE-OF-THE ART WEAPONS FOR ARMY
Siranuysh Papyan, Interviewer
Interview – 11 February 2015, 14:39
Interview with Samvel Karapetyan, archeologist
Mr. Karapetyan, it became known that in 2006-2007 a personal bank
account existed Swiss HSBC with 1.1 million dollars on it. Was it
unexpected for you and can this change the public attitude?
I am not surprised, nor was it unexpected. First, any organization that
is not national is sacrilegious for me. The target of this organization
is not the homeland, this church has never taught its pasture to live
for the sake of their homeland and it has never acted in favor of the
homeland but was for migration, guided by the dishonest saying “live
where there is bread” and it is not accidental that this saying is so
ubiquitous here, because it comes from the behavior of the church. It
is in the part of the world where there is bread, it has never lived
for the sake of the homeland and has never led its pasture to live
for the sake of the homeland. From this point of view, it is not a
national organization, and I do not care in which country and which
bank a non-national organization keeps its money.
Isn’t the Mother See supposed to account for registering bank accounts
of the Mother See in the name of the Catholicoses?
Who should it account to? The public…? The public has been uprooted,
and one may not account to a public without roots. Do you know what
kind of public would demand an account? The one which has learnt to and
lives for the sake of its homeland, and its greatest value is homeland,
and if someone betrays their homeland, such society would hold the
organization responsible. However, because of the seeds sown by this
organization our society is wasted in national terms, it has lost its
quality and therefore been uprooted. On what grounds should the one
that has been uprooted hold responsible the one which has uprooted it?
This bank account was opened in 2000. The spokesman for the Mother See
explained that the money was raised for the church over these years.
At least over the past few years the Catholicos was distinguished
for initiatives in construction. And recently I have made rough
calculations of how much money has been spent on building churches
since independence all over the world. I did rough calculations: over
two billion dollars has been spent on building churches all over the
world, and I am sure that an organization which spent such immense
amounts on building churches would have savings in Swiss and other
countries’ banks. These are immense funds, and one fourth of this
money would be enough to have an army armed with state-of-the-art
weapons. Of course, now they are focused on basic things, such as
night vision equipment, basic things that everyone should have at
the border area. Can you imagine that this sacrilegious organization,
instead of sucking money and building meaningless mental houses called
us to buy modern weapons for our army which is crucial to the survival
of our nation? 25 years after the earthquake people still live in
cottages. You should not invest millions of dollars in building some
church while our pasture lives in humid cottages, suffering diseases a
quarter or century after the earthquake. This is a shame, such sea of
indifference towards one’s pasture, they don’t care for the Armenian
people, and they imagine themselves shepherds. They are a sacrilegious
organization with sacrilegious personnel. This is a treacherous and
rootless organization which intends to squeeze the nation by misleading
it, well it’s just a 100% non-national organization. They are teaching
children history of the Armenian Church, fooling children.
According to the clarification of the church, the church is a
national religious organization and is not subject to taxation,
and the patriarch is exempt from taxes.
Look, who are those 6000 deserters? The ones who are trying to live
in welfare at the expense of the misery of their pasture. These 6000
are only in the territory of Armenia, the army is swarming with them,
with their anti-national preaches in schools they have not allowed
us to put down roots in this land. Migrating from one continent to
another like fugitive, gathering people around them for just a few
decades, they are watching how their pasture is destroyed in front
of them, they don’t care about this, they built churches outside,
they did not even make Armenian inscriptions on them, there are only
French inscriptions on the Armenian church of Marseilles, they did not
even write in Armenian, they don’t care for the alphabet invented by
Saint Mesrop Mashtots, neither do they care for the language. All major
migrations from the homeland were always headed by the clergymen. This
is disaster, if you believe in the Armenian Apostolic Church, you
are digging your own grave.
Mr. Karapetyan, recently the dioceses have been having troubles. The
Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem makes tough statements, blaming the
Catholicos, the problems in the French Diocese have not been resolved
for a long time. Is everything starting to float?
The primates of both patriarchies of Jerusalem and Polis are no
better, believe me. They are used to slavery, Muslims go to them and
ask to baptize them and convert to the Armenian Apostolic Church, they
refuse, they say they will have problems with the state. The Armenian
Apostolic organization is a servile organization, be it Vagharshapat
or Jerusalem, it is the same homeless rubbish in different bins.
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