News

Details

Last Updated: 14 April 2015

CWN - The government of Turkey has recalled its ambassador to the Holy See, protesting a strong public statement by Pope Francis condemning the Armenian genocide.

The Pope said that the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Turkish regime in 1915 was “the first genocide of the 20th century.” Those words were identical to the formula used in a statement released jointly in 2001 by St. John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin II, the leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

But the Turkish government, which had let the earlier statement pass without a major protest, objected vehemently to the statement by Pope Francis. Turkey has lobbied energetically for decades against characterization of the Armenian deaths as genocide.

Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu complained that the papal statement was “far from historic and legal truths,” and “unacceptable.” He went on to say that religious leaders should not made “unfounded claims” to stir up hatred.

Turkey’s foreign ministry summoned the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Lucibello, to express outrage over the Pope’s words, and recalled the country’s own ambassador, Mehmet Pacaci, from Rome “for consultations.” The foreign ministry said that the Pope’s words were “based on prejudice, which distorts history and reduces the pains suffered in Anatolia under the conditions of the First World War to members of just one religion." Armenian leaders, on the other hand, were delighted with the Pope’s statement. President Serge Sarkisian was that the Pontiff had delivered “a powerful message to the international community.”

Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX of the Armenian Catholic Church told the Fides news agency that the Turkish government is sensitive to conflicts between Christianity and Islam. But the Armenian prelate said: “The Pope is not lined up 'with' Armenians 'against' the Turks. He is not against anyone.” The Pontiff, he said, spoke as the conscience of mankind. “The memory and the condemnation of the horrors of the past can serve to prevent those things from happening again, as unfortunately is happening even now in many parts of the world, starting from the Middle East.” Turkey’s leaders, representing a secular government in a society where Muslim public influence is growing steadily, have sought to enlist Vatican support for their own claims that the Western world is hostile to Islam. The government reacted sharply, therefore, to the Pope’s suggestion that Turkey itself was guilty of a genocidal campaign against a Christian ethnic group.

Details

Last Updated: 14 April 2015

CWN - Celebrating Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on April 12 for the faithful of the Armenian rite, Pope Francis officially proclaimed St. Gregory of Narek the 36th doctor of the Church.

In a Latin-language apostolic letter issued that day, Pope Francis discussed the saint’s life, his poetry and mysticism, and his theological works. In 1988, the hierarchy of the Armenian Catholic Church, an Eastern church in full communion with the Holy See, asked St. John Paul II to name St. Gregory a doctor of the Church, and over the decades the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith examined his writings.

Following a unanimous affirmative vote of a special commission, Pope Francis decided to name him a doctor of the Church on the centenary of the Armenian genocide.

The April 12 Mass was concelebrated by the patriarch of the Armenian Catholic Church. Also present at the sacred liturgy were the two leading figures of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the nation’s president.

During his homily, Pope Francis lamented the Armenian genocide, as well as other genocides, such as those perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin:

On a number of occasions I have spoken of our time as a time of war, a third world war which is being fought piecemeal, one in which we daily witness savage crimes, brutal massacres and senseless destruction. Sadly, today too we hear the muffled and forgotten cry of so many of our defenceless brothers and sisters who, on account of their faith in Christ or their ethnic origin, are publicly and ruthlessly put to death – decapitated, crucified, burned alive – or forced to leave their homeland.

Today too we are experiencing a sort of genocide created by general and collective indifference, by the complicit silence of Cain, who cries out: “What does it matter to me? Am I my brother’s keeper?” (cf. Gen 4:9; Homily in Redipuglia, 13 September 2014).

In the past century our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies. The first, which is widely considered “the first genocide of the twentieth century” (JOHN PAUL II and KAREKIN II, Common Declaration, Etchmiadzin, 27 September 2001), struck your own Armenian people, the first Christian nation, as well as Catholic and Orthodox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks. Bishops and priests, religious, women and men, the elderly and even defenseless children and the infirm were murdered.

The remaining two were perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism.

And more recently there have been other mass killings, like those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia. It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood. It seems that the enthusiasm generated at the end of the Second World War has dissipated and is now disappearing. It seems that the human family has refused to learn from its mistakes caused by the law of terror, so that today too there are those who attempt to eliminate others with the help of a few and with the complicit silence of others who simply stand by. We have not yet learned that “war is madness”, “senseless slaughter” (cf. Homily in Redipuglia, 13 September 2014).

“Dear Armenian Christians, today, with hearts filled with pain but at the same time with great hope in the risen Lord, we recall the centenary of that tragic event, that immense and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forebears had to endure. It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honor their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester,” the Pope added. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it! visitez le pilemeds.com internet à venir”

Additional sources for this story
Some links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

Details

Last Updated: 14 April 2015

CWN - Catholics in Jordan will celebrate Easter on April 12, in accordance with a new agreement that unites the day of the Easter celebration for Orthodox and Catholic believers in the Holy Land.

In 2012, the Catholic ordinaries of the Holy Land made a commitment to celebrate Easter at the same time as the Orthodox, explaining that they “listened to the voice of the faithful” in making the decision. The joint celebration had already been common in some places where Catholics form a minority of the Christian population.

The celebration of Easter according to the Julian calendar applies to all the Catholic churches of the Holy Land, encompassing dioceses and eparchies in Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. However, the agreement does not apply in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where the Gregorian calendar is followed to accommodate the many Catholic pilgrims who arrive for Holy Week and Easter as they are celebrated in the rest of the Catholic world.

Latin-rite Patriarch Fouad Twal of Jerusalem has been in Jordan for Holy Week services this week.

Details

Last Updated: 14 April 2015

CWN - Safouh Al-Mosleh, an Eastern Catholic worker for Caritas Syria, died during the bombing of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, on April 7.

The situation has worsened in Aleppo in recent days following the fall of nearby Idlib to Islamist rebels.

“Aleppo has been cut off for 16 days, with no telecommunications, Internet or electricity,” Caritas reported. “In the last four days, the situation is even worse with the escalation of mortar shells hitting the city every day.”

Details

Last Updated: 14 April 2015

CWN - The Armenian genocide of 1915 “places before us the darkness of the mysterium iniquitatis," Pope Francis said as he met on April 9 with a group of bishops of the Armenian Catholic Church.

The Armenian bishops were in Rome for the April 11 ceremony in which the Pontiff will proclaim St. Gregory of Narek as a doctor of the Church. The Pope prayed that this ceremony, taking place on the feast of Divine Mercy, might “heal every wound and to expedite concrete gestures of reconciliation and peace between the nations that still have not managed to reach a reasonable consensus on the interpretation of these sad events.”

Details

Last Updated: 14 April 2015

CWN - The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who holds a primacy of honor among the Orthodox churches, recently issued a statement on the “human right to water and sanitation.”

“Water is a fundamental human right, which must be accessible to all people regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or any other aspect of discrimination,” Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I said in his statement.

“How can we – as rational and responsible people – allow over a quarter of the world’s population not to have access to safe drinking water, while almost half of the world’s population faces the indignity of inadequate sanitation?” he asked.

“Greed under the disguise of growth insults the image of God in our fellow human beings,” he added. “We implore large corporations and businesses to seek alternative means of production, which do not pollute or harm our planet’s resources for the sake of mere profit. And we pray for world peace, particularly in the Middle East, where water is employed as a weapon of persecution and destruction.”