John Paul II was the first Pope to use that word considered taboo in Turkey. And there were already signs of crisis with Ankara at the very start of Francis’ papacy.
The Turkish government’s harsh reaction to the Holy See over the words Francis used yesterday to define the systematic extermination of the Armenians in 1915 was somewhat expected. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said the Pope’s comments were “unacceptable” and stated that the Pope’s words reveal “a discrimination of Muslims and Turks in relation to Christians”. Mehmet Pacaçi, the Turkish ambassador to the Holy See, has been recalled to Ankara for consultations, after the apostolic envoy Antonio Lucibello was already summoned yesterday by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was informed of the Turkish government’s “irritation”. A note from the Turkish embassy at the Holy See claims that with the declarations of the pontiff “history has been instrumentalized for political ends”.
The minister of foreign affairs defined Francis’ words as “far from the legal and historical reality” and the Pope has been accused of ignoring the suffering of the Turks and Muslims during the events of 1915, when according to the official account of Ankara, at least half a million were killed by the Armenians. Later in the evening, a new attack on Francis arrived from the Turkish Minister for European Affairs, Volkan Bozkir, who declared that the Pope made these comments because he comes from Argentina, a country that “received the Nazis, the authors of the Holocaust of the Jews”. The minister, citing the Anadolu agency, also underlined that the Armenian diaspora is “dominant” in the world of business and media in South America. Turkey has long since transformed a historical topic into a politico-diplomatic controversy, protesting against any public declaration of the “Armenian genocide”, and as we will see, even getting ruffled by leaked accounts of reference to the “genocide” made in private.
On November 9, 2000, Pope John Paul II and the Catholicos Karekin II, head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, signed a «Joint Communique» in Rome, in which they explicitly referred to the «Armenian genocide»: «Leaders of nations no longer feared God, nor did they feel ashamed before humankind. For both of us, the 20th century was marked by extreme violence. The Armenian genocide, which began the century, was a prologue to horrors that would follow. Two world wars, countless regional conflicts and deliberately organized campaigns of extermination took the lives of millions of faithful». The initiative provoked a swift and severe response from Turkey.
The following year, during his visit to Armenia, Pope Wojtyla avoided the word “genocide” in his public speeches, but in the prayer he read, used the expression Metz Yeghérn, “Great Crime”, the term the Armenians have used to describe the tragedy. On 26 September, John Paul II visited the war memorial of Tzitzernakaberd, an architectural complex in Yerevan to commemorate the Armenian victims of 1915, and prayed with these words: “O Judge of the living and the dead, have mercy on us! Listen, O Lord, to the lament that rises from this place, to the call of the dead from the depths of the Metz Yeghérn, the cry of innocent blood that pleads like the blood of Abel, like Rachel weeping for her children because they are no more. Listen, Lord, to the voice of the Bishop of Rome, echoing the plea of his Predecessor Pope Benedict XV, when in 1915 he raised his voice in defence of ‘the sorely afflicted Armenian people brought to the brink of annihilation’.”
At the end of his visit to Armenia, the Pope and Karekin II signed a new “common declaration”, in which they wrote “The extermination of a million and a half Armenian Christians, in what is generally referred to as the first genocide of the twentieth century”. And so for the second time in just two years, although this time in a text signed jointly by the head of the Catholic Church and the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the word “genocide” appeared in reference to the massacres of 1915.
Benedict XVI, on the other hand, never used the word “genocide” during his papacy. Receiving Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni, the Armenian Catholic Patriarch of Cilicia, and members of the patriarchal synod, Pope Ratzinger gave a speech on 20 March 2006 in which he stated: “The Armenian Church, whose reference is the Patriarchate of Cilicia, certainly shares fully in the historical vicissitudes which the Armenian People have experienced down the centuries. In particular, she shares in the anguish it suffered in the name of the Christian faith in the years of the terrible persecution that in history recalls with sorrowful significance "metz yeghèrn", the great evil.”
As the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was close to the Argentinian Armenian community and had a plaque placed in a diocesan church in memory of the victims of the 1915 massacres. Few of us remember the diplomatic spat between the Holy See and Ankara in the very first months of Francis’ papacy, even though on this occasion Turkey’s irritation was merely down to indiscretions. On 3 June 2013, Pope Bergoglio received the Armenian Catholic Patriarch of Cilicia, Nerses Bedros XIX. Four days later, on 7 June, the first resident Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to the Holy See, Mikayel Minasyan, presented his credentials to the Pope. Minasyan later revealed to the public that on the previous days, during the meeting with Nerses Bedros, Francis had referred to the “genocide”. The ambassador’s claims were not denied by the Holy See and the indiscretion was enough to cause the Minister of Foreign Affairs to communicate his “disappointment both to the Embassy of the Holy See in Ankara and to the Vatican in Rome”, as the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported.
In the greeting that opened the mass yesterday morning, Francis placed the tragedy of 1915 within the context of the mass killings of the twentieth centuries, citing not only those under Nazism and Stalin, but also more recent tragedies that have occurred in Asia and Africa. With these words, he defined the first of the “unprecedented tragedies” of the last century: “The 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. Bishops and priests, religious, women and men, the elderly and even defenceless children and the infirm were murdered”. In the written text of the papal greeting, the phrase “the first genocide of the twentieth century”, is intentional in quotation marks and has the source of the quotation right after it (JOHN PAUL II and KAREKIN II, Common Declaration, Etchmiadzin, 27 September 2001), the common declaration they signed fourteen years ago. In this way, Pope Francis used the word “genocide” but at the same time by citing his predecessor, today a saint. Many had seen this coming, despite the fact that in the days leading up to the ceremony at St. Peter’s, Turkish diplomatic and Vatican sources were circulating speculations that the Pope would not use the term “genocide”.
If we reread the text of Francis’ greeting, and above all the homily and the message given to the Armenian people at the end of the liturgy, one can see how the recognition of the exterminations of 1915 was not designed to lay claims or place blame on Turkey for the events of one hundred years ago.
Answering a question on the Armenian genocide during the return flight from Istanbul to Rome, after his visit to Turkey last November, Pope Bergoglio used encouraging words about the Turkish president’s initial recognition of the Armenian tragedy: “The Turkish government made a gesture, last year: the then Prime Minister Erdogan wrote a letter on the anniversary; a letter that a few judged as too weak, but it was, in my opinion, great or small, I don't know, extending a hand. And this is always positive. I can reach out this way or that way, expecting the other person's response not to embarrass me. And this is positive, what the then Prime Minister did. One thing that is very close to my heart is the Turkish-Armenian border: if this could open, that frontier, it would be a beautiful thing! I know there are geopolitical problems in the area, which don't facilitate opening the border. But we have to pray for the reconciliation of the peoples. I also know there is good will on both sides – I believe this – and we have to help so that this can be achieved. Next year there are many commemorative events planned for this centenary, but let's hope to arrive by a path of small gestures, of small steps towards closeness
Denial of the events of 1915 despite the evidence, despite the intellectuals and historians in Turkey who recognise the events, diplomatic intervention so that discussion of historic events almost represents a vulnus inflicted on the Turkish nation: this is the road the government in Ankara has decided to take. As yesterday’s reaction to the Pope’s comments shows. These tensions are of no help at a very delicate time from a geopolitical perspective, given that Turkey currently has the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate at its borders, and is a country in which the blood of Catholics has been spilled in recent years: don Andrea Santoro was killed in Trebisonda in 2006, and Bishop Luigi Padovese was murdered in Iskenderun in 2010.
