The Vatican has refuted Turkey’s remarks that Pope Francis had a
“Crusader mentality” after he used the word “genocide” to describe the
mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces a century ago.
“The
pope is on no crusade. He is not trying to organize wars or build walls
but he wants to build bridges,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico
Lombardi told reporters. “He has not said a word against the Turkish
people.”
The pope on June 24 denounced the World War I killing of Armenians as genocide, prompting Turkey’s anger.
“Sadly
this tragedy, this genocide, was the first of the deplorable series of
catastrophes of the past century,” the pope said at the presidential
palace in Yerevan.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli
said on June 25 that it was “very unfortunate” the pope had used the
word, adding: “It is unfortunately possible to see all the reflections
and traces of a Crusader mentality in the actions of the papacy and the
pope.”
Pope Francis, who returned to Rome on June 26 after
visiting a monastery in Armenia near the border with Turkey, first used
the word last year during a ceremony at the Vatican. An infuriated
Turkey responded by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican and keeping
him away for 10 months.
Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire
were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War I as a
result of civil strife triggered in part by Armenians siding with
invading Russian
troops, but contests the figures and denies that the killings were
systematically orchestrated and constitute genocide. It also says many
Muslim Turks perished at that time.
On June 26, at the last main
event of his three-day trip to Armenia, Pope Francis again made
reference to the killings, paying homage to “the many victims of hatred
who suffered and gave their lives for the faith.”
Unusually for
the pope, he was a guest in a Christian liturgy at the Holy Etchmiadzin,
the headquarters of the Armenian Church near Yerevan, where someone
else called “His Holiness” presided.
The “divine liturgy” was
presided over by Catholicos Karekin II, head of the Armenian Apostolic
Church, which split from Rome over a theological dispute in the fifth
century and is part of the Oriental Orthodox Churches.
The
pope, who delighted his hosts by referring several times to the
killings and visiting Yerevan’s genocide memorial, has urged Armenia and
Turkey to seek reconciliation and to shun “the illusory power of
vengeance.”
“May God bless your future and grant that the people
of Armenia and Turkey take up again the path of reconciliation, and may
peace also spring forth in Nagorno-Karabakh,” said Pope Francis, in
regards to the conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which started in
the early 1990s and has been somewhat partially frozen since a
cease-fire in 1994.