ROME — Armenians around the world solemnly commemorated the 107th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide Sunday, marking the onset of a Turkish slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenian Christians.
Armenians recognize the date of April 24, 1915, when several hundred intellectuals were rounded up, arrested, and later executed, as the start of the Armenian Genocide, which is generally understood to have extended to 1917.
On Sunday, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Karekin II, together with clergy of the Armenian Church visited the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial where they performed a wreath-laying ceremony and offered prayers near the Eternal Flame.
In 2015, Pope Francis commemorated the 100th anniversary of the massacre of Armenians, calling it “the first genocide of the twentieth century” and thereby provoking the ire of Turkish officials.
The Turkish government immediately recalled its ambassador to the Holy See and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accused the pope of fueling “hatred and animosity” by spreading “unfounded allegations.”
The mass slaughter of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One remains a highly sensitive issue for modern Turkey (Getty)
Onlookers pray at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial in Yerevan on April 24, 2022, as Armenians mark the 107th anniversary of WWI-era mass killings. (KAREN MINASYAN/AFP via Getty Images)
In his address to Christian faithful of the Armenian rite, however, Francis condemned the massacre, underscoring its status as “genocide” and tying it to the global persecution of Christians taking place in the present day.
“In the past century our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies, Francis said. “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.”
The pope went on to say that the other two instances of genocide in the 20th century “were perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism.”
Members of Syria’s Armenian community take part in a candle-lit march on the eve of the anniversary of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during WWI, in the northeastern city of Qamishli on April 23, 2022. (DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
He also insisted that commemorating the memory of the slain Armenian Christians was a duty, because “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!” he said.
“Sadly,” he said, “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 – decapitated, crucified, burned alive – or forced to leave their homeland.”
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