Vatican hits back at Turkey for calling Pope ‘crusader’

On Sunday, Francis turned his attention to religious affairs, participating in an open-air liturgy on the grounds of the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Etchmiadzin, the seat of the Oriental Orthodox church here.

“The Armenian Apostolic Church and the Catholic Church share the same vision of the family, based on marriage, an act of freely given and faithful love between man and woman”.

The Vatican’s spokesman Father Federico Lombardi has cleared the air over the Pope’s use of the term “genocide” during his speech at the Armenian presidential palace on Friday to describe the mass killings of Armenians in 1915.

When Francis used the term a year ago, during a special remembrance Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, Turkey recalled its ambassador and accused the pope of speaking “nonsense”.

Pope Francis I, who is visiting Armenia, has wished normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey and peace settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh, the mostly Armenian-populated enclave region of Azerbaijan.

After Sunday’s liturgy and a formal luncheon, Francis headed west toward Armenia’s border with Turkey to visit the Khor Virap monastery, one of the most sacred sites in Armenia.

“I pray here, with pain in my heart, that such tragedies will not happen again, that humanity does not forget and knows how to overcome evil with good”, the pope wrote in the guest book in Italian. Memory can not be stifled or forgotten! “It is essential that those responsible for the future of the nations undertake courageously and without delay initiatives aimed at ending these sufferings, making their primary goal the quest for peace, the defense and acceptance of victims of aggression and persecution, the promotion of justice and sustainable development”.

“Peoples, like individuals, have a memory”, he told the crowd from the makeshift altar.

“In the joint declaration they commemorated once again “The extermination of a million and a half Armenian Christians, in what is generally referred to as the first genocide of the twentieth century” – echoing the words first used by Pope John II during his trip to the country in 2001″.

Francis is due to lay a floral wreath at the memorial and greet descendants of the Armenian orphans who were taken in by Pope Pius XI in the 1920s and housed at his summer residence south of Rome. “This vast and senseless slaughter this tragic mystery of iniquity that your people experienced in the flesh, remains impressed in our memory and burns in our hearts”, he said during evening prayers in the Armenian capital.

“May God give you strength, bless and keep firm our Churches in love and collaboration and may He grant us new opportunities for witness of brotherhood”. “Your own people’s memory is ancient and precious”.

Francis returned to the theme of memory during a Mass in Gyumri, where several thousand people gathered in a square for his only public Catholic Mass of his three-day visit to Armenia.

Moments later Francis turned to Karekin and asked for a blessing, requesting the patriarch to “bless me and the Catholic Church, and to bless this our path towards full unity”.

Francis has always been a vocal supporter of the Armenian cause, which dates back to his close relationship with the Armenian diaspora community in his native Argentina, as Sylvia has reported.

Demourian reported from Yerevan, Armenia.