POPE FRANCIS SET TO RILE TURKEY BY RECALLING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
19:21, 30 Mar 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
One week after Easter Sunday, Pope Francis is scheduled to celebrate
a service in the Armenian Catholic rite to commemorate the 100th
anniversary of a mass killing of Armenians by Turks in the early 20th
century that the pontiff defined two years ago as the “first genocide
of the modern era,” cruxnow.com reports.
In a time of mounting anti-Christian violence in various corners of
the Middle East, the pope’s act is likely to take on more than merely
historical interest.
The April 12 papal liturgy is part of a broader campaign by Armenians
to keep the memory of their suffering alive, which will feature the
ringing of bells in Armenian churches around the world on April 23
at 19:15 (7:15 p.m.), the hour chosen to symbolically recall the year
1915. Bells will sound everywhere but Turkey, where the small number
of churches still in operation will remain silent.
Francis has long been aware of the calamity that befell Turkey’s
Armenian minority, having led an ecumenical service of remembrance
in Buenos Aires in 2006.
“Today we come to pray for this people to whom human rights still don’t
apply,” then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio said on that occasion. He
called for “the end of the empire’s silence,” referring to the Ottomans
and their successors in today’s Turkey, saying that acknowledging
what had happened would “bring peace to the Armenian people.”
Scholars believe that 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians died as
a result of efforts to drive Armenians and other minorities from
their homelands in present-day Turkey after World War I. It’s
often acknowledged as the first genocide of the 20th century, and
a forerunner to later atrocities such as those committed by Nazi
Germany and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.
Many observers also see echoes of the Armenian genocide in today’s
ISIS campaign to proclaim itself a “caliphate” and to drive Christians
and other minority groups out of territory under its control.
The pontiff’s April 12 commemoration is likely to stir diplomatic
controversy, since Turkey officially insists that what happened
a century ago was the result of civil war and unrest, and that the
Armenian death toll has been inflated. Turkey also asserts that large
numbers of Turks, Kurds, and Arabs died in the same period.
The sensitivity can be glimpsed from the fact that during his three-day
visit to Turkey last November, Pope Francis never publicly mentioned
the Armenian genocide. When asked about the omission by a reporter,
he said only that he hoped for “small gestures” of reconciliation
such as opening the Turkish/Armenian border.
Only 22 countries, including Russia, Germany, Argentina, France,
Italy, Venezuela, and the Vatican, officially recognize the massacres
as genocide. Turkey objects vigorously whenever public figures use
the term, including delivering an official note of protest two years
ago when Francis called the killings a “genocide.”
Italian journalist Marco Tosatti, who has written extensively on the
persecution of Armenians under the Turks, says this isn’t just a debate
among historians, but a matter of Turkey “owning up to its own past.”
Tosatti said that for most of its more than 600-year history,
the Ottoman Empire prided itself on being multi-ethnic and
multi-religious. When it began to crumble in the early 20th century,
however, the architects of the new Turkey were nationalists who decided
that minority groups “needed to be gone … because they signified
a problem to the idea of a nation with one ethnicity and one religion.”
Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians in Turkey all found themselves under
mounting pressure. On the night of April 24, 1915, more than 200
leaders in the Armenian community in what’s known today as Istanbul
were arrested and most were executed, beginning a systemic killing
and forced relocation that would last until 1923.
The Jesuit-run magazine Civilta Cattolica, which enjoys semi-official
Vatican status, recently published statistics showing that of the
98,800 Catholic Armenian faithful living in Turkey when the killings
began, only 33,900 survived. Of 156 churches and chapels, only 20 stood
at the end, and of 110 missions, only 10 were still active by 1923.
One of the reasons it’s difficult for modern Turkey to recognize
the genocide, Tosatti said, is the fact that the new Turkish state,
created in 1923, has Armenian blood in its founding stones.
“The new Turkish republic has at its base this original sin, with
which it can’t settle the score,” he said.
Another factor in explaining Turkey’s reticence, he said, is the fact
that in the Middle East, a nation that apologizes puts itself in a
position of weakness.
“But even for many inside [Turkey], it’s not possible to keep hiding
what is evident,” Tosatti said. “There are documents, including a diary
of [one of the founders of Turkey], detailing the number of deaths.”
The Vatican’s remembrance of the genocide comes 12 days before the
actual centennial. Holding the ceremony in advance will allow all
Armenian communities to participate in the Mass celebrated by Francis
on the Sunday of the Divine Mercy.
The Armenian Catholic Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX, together with the
Armenian bishops, plan to attend. Patriarch Karekin II of the Apostolic
Armenian Church and Catholicos Aram I, head of the Catholicosate of
Cilicia, are also expected to attend.
Before his election to the papacy, Francis had referred to the Armenian
genocide in a series of conversations he had with his Argentinian
friend Rabbi Abraham Skorka, compiled in the 2010 book “On Heaven
and Earth.”
The future pope said the world “washed its hands” while the mass
killings were occurring.
“The Ottoman Empire was strong, and the world was at war and looking
the other way,” he said.
It’s a position he has maintained as pope. In June 2013, the pontiff
welcomed Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni, Patriarch of the Catholic Armenian
Church, to the Vatican in a private audience that included the daughter
of a genocide survivor.
Francis took her hands in his and told her, “Yours was the first
genocide of the 20th century.”
Soon after, Turkey’s foreign minister defined the pope’s statement as
“completely unacceptable,” which forced the Vatican spokesman to say
that the remarks were in no way a formal or public declaration, and
therefore didn’t constitute a public assertion by the pope recognizing
the genocide.
Pope Francis’ words, however, are in line with his immediate
predecessors, who also addressed the systematic annihilation of
Armenians.
In Nov. 2000, Pope John Paul II and Armenian Patriarch Karekin II
signed a joint statement that said: “The Armenian genocide, which
began the century, was a prologue to horrors that would follow.”
When Pope John Paul II traveled to Armenia the following year, he
avoided using the word “genocide,” instead employing the expression
“Metz Yeghèrn” (Great Evil), used by the Armenians as a synonym of
the genocide.
At the end of his visit, however, John Paul II and Karekin II signed
a new statement in which they condemned the extermination of 1 1/2
million Armenian Christians “in what is generally referred to as the
first genocide of the twentieth century.”
On March 2006, when Benedict XVI received the Armenian Patriarch of
Cilicia, he talked about a “terrible persecution that is written in
history with the sadly evocative name of Metz Yeghèrn, the great evil.”
Some 80 years before that, in September of 1915, Pope Benedict XV was
the only sovereign to publicly intervene in favor of the Armenians. He
sent a letter to Sultan Mohammed V in which he highlighted the
seriousness of the massacres and asked, in vain, for them to stop.
According to the Vatican’s files, other letters would follow with
the same results.
“We’re told of entire populations of villages and cities being forced
to abandon their homes and moved with untold hardship and suffering
to distant concentration camps,” the 1915 letter says. “We exhort to
your magnanimous generosity to have pity and intervene in favor of
this people.”