VATICAN CITY — Armenians were the victims of “the first genocide of the 20th century,” Pope Francis said Sunday, prompting Turkey to recall its Vatican ambassador home to Ankara.
Similar remarks from the Catholic leadership in the past have triggered protests from Turkey, which denies that the mass deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I was genocide. Armenians say up to 1.5 million people were killed.
“In the past century, our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies,” Francis said at the start of a remembrance mass in St Peter’s Basilica for the 1915-16 mass slaughter of the Armenians.
“The first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century, struck your own Armenian people, the first Christian nation, as well as Catholic and Orthodox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks,” Francis said.
The pope said the other two genocides of the last century “were perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism” and went on to say the world is in the midst of another genocide, the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.
The leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Supreme Patriarch Karekin II, thanked the pope at the end an the elaborate service.
“The Armenian genocide is an unforgettable and undeniable fact of history, deeply rooted in the annals of modern history and in the common consciousness of the Armenian people. Therefore, any attempt to erase it from history and from our common memory is doomed to fail,” Karekin said.
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan also attended the mass at the Vatican.
“With these celebrations in St Peter’s, the Holy Father has sent a vigorous signal to the international community,” namely “that uncondemned genocides represent a danger for all of humanity,” he told Italian news agency ANSA.
“It is the responsibility not only of the Armenian people and the universal Church to recall all that has taken place, but of the entire human family,” Francis said in a written message delivered to Armenian religious and political leaders after mass.
Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, says both Turks and Armenians were killed during the war and accuses Armenia of inflating the number of people who died. The deportations were said to be for security reasons.
It is not the first time that the Vatican has used the word “genocide” to describe the events of 100 years ago.
On Sunday, the pope quoted a joint 2000 declaration from his predecessor, John Paul II.
At the time, the Turkish Foreign Ministry criticized the papal remarks as “unacceptable” and warned the Vatican against “making steps that could have irreparable consequences on our ties.”
“What is expected from the papacy, under the responsibility of its spiritual office, is to contribute to world peace instead of raising animosity over historical events,” the ministry said.
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