An Armenian Delegation Visits the Pope
On June 3, 2013, Pope Francis received Nersès Bédros XIX Tarmouni, Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians, accompanied by a delegation of Armenians. The participants included a descendant of a family that survived the genocide perpetrated by Turkey in 1915, and she spoke to the Pope, presenting herself as a survivor. The Pope then responded: “the first genocide of the 20th century was that of the Armenians.”
This fact, published on June 4 by the news agency Imedia/zenit, was also reported on June 7 by the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet: “The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses the country’s point of view on the matter and has declared its disappointment to the Nuncio in Ankara and to the Turkish embassy at the Vatican.”
On June 7, the Armenian ambassador at the Holy See, Mikayel Minasyan, presented his credentials to Pope Francis. During the interview, the historical, cultural and religious relations between Armenia and the Holy See were evoked, and the Armenian ambassador thanked the Pope for his recognition of the Armenian genocide. While still bishop of Buenos Aires, the Holy Father had already declared this in 2006, and had exhorted Turkey to recognize the “genocide” as “Ottoman Turkey’s gravest crime against the Armenian people and all of humanity.”
Between 1915 and 1916, two thirds of the Armenians living on what is now Turkish territory were exterminated during the great deportations and massacres operated by the Ottoman empire. While most western countries have recognized the reality of the Armenian genocide, Turkey has always refused to recognize a “genocide”, admitting only a certain number of unplanned massacres, that fall to the responsibility of a regime that has since disappeared. At the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire included 2 million Armenians, for a total population of 36 million.
(sources: apic/imedia/hurriyet/VIS – DICI#277 June 21, 2013)
