On Saturday, June 25, 2016, Turkish deputy prime minister Nurettin Canikli called
Francis’ comments of the previous day “greatly unfortunate” and said they bore the hallmarks
of the “mentality of the Crusades.” When Francis first used the word genocide last year, Turkey withdrew its ambassador for 10 months and accused the Pope of spreading lies.
Canikli said the term “does not comply with the truth”. “Everyone knows that. We all know it, the whole world knows it, and so do the Armenians,” he added. (*)
“The pope is not doing Crusades,” he said Sunday. “He has said no words against the Turkish people.”
Francis made the remarks at the start of his three-day visit and
followed up with a call for the world to never forget or minimize the
“immense and senseless slaughter.” He wrapped up his trip with a Sunday Mass in the Apostolic cathedral of Holy Echmiadzin and a visit to Armenia’s border with Turkey, closed by the latter since 1992.
Francis has said he would love to see the border reopened, given his
longstanding call for countries to build bridges, not walls, at their
frontiers. He released a dove of peace near the border at the Khor
Virap monastery.
On Saturday, Francis paid his respects at Armenia’s imposing genocide
memorial and greeted descendants of survivors of the 1915 massacres.
“Here I pray with sorrow in my heart, so that a tragedy like this
never again occurs, so that humanity will never forget and will know how
to defeat evil with good,” Francis wrote in the memorial’s guest book.
“May God protect the memory of the Armenian people. Memory should never
be watered-down or forgotten. Memory is the source of peace and the
future.”
Francis
also greeted descendants of the 400 or so Armenian orphans taken in by
Popes Benedict XV and Pius XI at the papal summer residence south of
Rome in the 1920s.
“A blessing has come down on the land of Mount Ararat,” said Angela
Adjemian, a 35-year old refugee from Syria who was a guest at the
memorial. “He has given us the strength and confidence to keep our
Christian faith no matter what.”
Francis raised the importance of memory at an evening prayer in
Yerevan’s Republic Square, which drew the largest crowds of his visit,
around 50,000 according to Vatican estimates. With Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II by his side and President Serzh Sargsyan
in the front row, Francis said even the greatest pain “can become a seed
of peace for the future”.
“Memory, infused with love, becomes capable of setting out on new and
unexpected paths, where designs of hatred become projects of
reconciliation, where hope arises for a better future for everyone,” he
said.
He specifically called for Armenia and Turkey to take up the “path of
reconciliation” and said: “May peace also spring forth in
Nagorno-Karabakh.”
(Abridged and adapted from "The Guardian," June 26, 2016)
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(*) Emphasis added ("Armeniaca")
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