Pope Francis on Sunday, at the beginning of Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica honoring the 100th anniversary of the murder of Armenian civilians by the Ottoman Empire, called it “the first genocide of the 20th century.”
In response, Turkey told the Vatican’s ambassador that it was “deeply sorry and disappointed, ” saying the Pope’s comments had caused a “problem of trust”.
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Francis defended his declaration saying it was his duty to honor the memory of the innocent men, women, children, priests and bishops who were “senselessly” murdered by the Turks.
“Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it, ” he said the centenary.
As many as 1.5 million Armenian civilians were killed by Ottoman soldiers during World War I.
But Turkey has denied it had anything to do with a genocide, insisting the numbers were inflated, and that the victims were casualties of a civil war.
Turkey’s embassy to the Holy See canceled a planned news conference for Sunday, in protest of the fact that the pope used the G-word, despite their vehement objections.
Some otherwise civilized countries, like Italy and the U.S., have avoided using the G-word officially, because it makes the Turks angry, and the Turks are an important ally in the Near East and members of NATO, so, come on.
Pope Francis said the Armenian mass murders were the first of three “massive and unprecedented” genocides, followed by the Holocaust and Stalinism. He then counted the more modern holocausts that followed, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia.
“It seems that the human family has refused to learn from its mistakes caused by the law of terror, so that today too there are those who attempt to eliminate others with the help of a few and with the complicit silence of others who simply stand by, ” the Pope said.
Pope Francis has frequently denounced the “complicit silence” of the world community in the face of the modern day slaughter of Christians and other religious minorities by Islamic extremists. And while he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio referred to the Armenian “genocide” on several occasions, including three separate citations in his 2010 book “On Heaven and Earth.”
Of course, the Internet is rife with revelations of Pope Francis’ cozy relationship with Argentina’s military dictatorship back when he was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist and founder of the website GlobalResearch.ca, has written that Jorge Mario Bergoglio “not only supported the dictatorship, he also played a direct and complicit role in the ‘Dirty War’ (la guerra sucia) in liaison with the military Junta headed by General Jorge Videla, leading to the arrest, imprisonment, torture and disappearance of progressive Catholic priests and laymen who were opposed to Argentina’s military rule.”
Pass it on to the Turks…
