{"id":668,"date":"2015-04-12T13:44:06","date_gmt":"2015-04-12T09:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/?p=668"},"modified":"2015-04-14T13:52:53","modified_gmt":"2015-04-14T09:52:53","slug":"pope-francis-reaffirms-genocide-recognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/?p=668","title":{"rendered":"Pope Francis Reaffirms Genocide Recognition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a title=\"Pope Francis Reaffirms Genocide Recognition\" href=\"http:\/\/asbarez.com\/133961\/pope-francis-reaffirms-genocide-recognition\/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Asbarez+%28Asbarez+News%29\" target=\"_blank\">(asbarez.com) <\/a>VATICAN (RFE\/RL)\u2013Pope Francis on Sunday again described the massacres of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as \u201cthe first Genocide of the 20th century\u201d during an unprecedented Vatican Mass dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the tragedy.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Francis remembered the victims of \u201cthat immense and senseless slaughter\u201d at the start of the Mass at St. Peter\u2019s basilica, which was attended by President Serzh Sarkisian, the supreme heads of the Armenian Apostolic Churches and hundreds of Armenian Catholics.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/nHkMeKLo_Mw?feature=player_embedded\" height=\"360\" width=\"640\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cIt is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honor their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester. Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,\u201d he declared.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The pontiff spoke of \u201cthree massive and unprecedented tragedies\u201d of the past century. \u201cThe first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, struck your own Armenian people, the first Christian nation, as well as Catholic and Orthodox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cBishops 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Humanity, he went on, did not learn lessons from those tragedies as evidenced by the mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia later in the 20th century. \u201cSadly, today too we hear the muffled and forgotten cry of so many of our defenseless brothers and sisters who, on account of their faith in Christ or their ethnic origin, are publicly and ruthlessly put to death \u2026 or forced to leave their homeland,\u201d he said in a clear reference to the beleaguered Christian communities in Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Francis\u2019s characterization of the 1915 mass killings and deportations of Armenians was in tune with his views on the subject repeatedly voiced in the past. He publicly called them \u201cthe first genocide of the 20th century\u201d in 2013 just a few months after becoming supreme head of the Roman Catholic Church. The Turkish government condemned that statement.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Official Ankara, which strongly denies a deliberate government effort to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, did not immediately react to the pope\u2019s latest statement. It had reportedly pressured him in recent weeks to avoid uttering the word \u201cgenocide.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">According to the Associated Press news agency, Turkey\u2019s embassy to the Vatican canceled a planned news conference for Sunday, presumably after learning that the pope will after all use the politically sensitive term.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The two-hour Mass was concelebrated by Armenian Catholic Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX and featured medieval Armenian religious hymns performed by two choirs from Gyumri. Underlining its ecumenical spirit, Catholicos Karekin II, Catholicos Aram I and over a dozen bishops of the Armenian Apostolic Church sat in a place of honor in the basilica along with President Sarkisian.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_669\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-669\" style=\"width: 576px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Pope-Francis-Armenian-Catholicoi-Vatican-bishops.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-669\" alt=\"Pope is flanked by the two Catholicoi and the Vatican bishops\" src=\"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Pope-Francis-Armenian-Catholicoi-Vatican-bishops.jpg\" width=\"576\" height=\"324\" srcset=\"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Pope-Francis-Armenian-Catholicoi-Vatican-bishops.jpg 576w, https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Pope-Francis-Armenian-Catholicoi-Vatican-bishops-300x168.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 576px) 100vw, 576px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-669\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pope is flanked by the two Catholicoi and the Vatican bishops<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In another unprecedented development, Karekin II and Aram I embraced Francis at the altar and delivered sermons at the end of the ceremony broadcast live to Armenia.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cOur ancient people were uprooted from their cradle and historic homeland and scattered around the world,\u201d Garegin said in reference to the Armenian genocide. \u201cOur centuries-old Christian heritage was torn down, destroyed and seized.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cHowever, nothing \u2014 neither suffering, nor persecution or even death \u2014 forced our people to renounce their sacred faith,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Both Karekin II and Aram I expressed their \u201cdeep gratitude\u201d to the Roman Catholic Church for its attempts to stop the genocide and support its survivors. They specifically paid tribute to Pope Benedict XV who protested to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V against the massacres.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cWe will never forget the continuous concern, assistance and solidarity of the Church of Rome towards Armenians \u2014 that is to say towards justice,\u201d said Aram.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Francis also honored Armenia and its worldwide Diaspora by bestowing the title of \u201cDoctor of the Universal Church\u201d on St. Gregory of Narek, a 10-11th century Armenian cleric renowned for his religious writings. Only 35 Christian figures have received the Catholic title to date. A large picture of Gregory was put on display during Sunday\u2019s Mass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(asbarez.com) VATICAN (RFE\/RL)\u2013Pope Francis on Sunday again described the massacres of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as \u201cthe first Genocide of the 20th century\u201d during an unprecedented Vatican Mass dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the tragedy. Francis remembered the victims of \u201cthat immense and senseless slaughter\u201d at the start of the Mass at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":669,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":670,"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions\/670"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniancause.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}