The church’s supreme head, Catholicos Garegin II, and bishops said the “shameful” campaign is designed to “silence the voice of the Church and reduce its public influence” and linked it to Azerbaijan’s continuing demands to Armenia.
“The Armenian Church, conscious of its commitments, will steadfastly continue its mission of spiritual salvation and national preservation, opposing nationally harmful and destructive processes and constantly pursuing the protection of the paramount interests of the state and nation, our sacred values,” they said in a statement issued after an emergency meeting at the church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin.
The statement marked the church’s first official reaction to the campaign which Pashinian began last Thursday during a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan. He used obscene language to attack the next day senior clergymen who deplored his claims that churches across Armenia look like “closets” and are littered with construction waste.
In a series of other social media posts, Pashinian alleged that many of those clergymen have had secret sex affairs in breach of their vows of celibacy and must therefore be defrocked. He did not offer any proof of his claims.
“If it turns out that Garegin II has indeed broken his vow of celibacy and has a child, he cannot be the Catholicos of All Armenians,” he wrote on Monday.
In another post, Pashinian declared that the Armenian government must have a “decisive say” in the choice of the next Catholicos. Some legal experts described the demand as illegal, pointing to the church’s long-running independence and separation from the state guaranteed by the Armenian constitution.
“Church issues are resolved in accordance with church orders and rules and are beyond the jurisdiction of state and political figures,” read the statement by the top clergy,
“We call on relevant state bodies to stop this illegal and short-sighted policy of the prime minister. There is no need to involve the Church in artificial agendas and push it into counter-action,” it warned.
Some furious government critics have called on the church to excommunicate Pashinian in response to his profanities used against clerics. They as well as representatives of Armenia’s leading opposition groups have also accused Pashinian of coordinating his smear campaign with Azerbaijan. They argue that it followed Baku’s renewed criticism of the Armenian Church and is being covered and praised by Azerbaijani state media.
The church statement similarly said that Pashinian’s campaign is “somewhat connected with the slander and false accusations directed against the Armenian people and the Armenian Church by the Azerbaijani propaganda machine.”
The ancient church, to which the vast majority of Armenians around the world belong, has blamed Pashinian for the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh and denounced his unilateral concessions to Azerbaijan.
Garegin attended and addressed late last week an international conference in Switzerland on the preservation of Karabakh’s Armenian religious and cultural heritage. In a speech, he accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas. He also denounced the ongoing “sham trials” of eight former Karabakh leaders captured during Azerbaijan’s September 2023 offensive. Garegin described them as hostages.
By contrast, Pashinian and other Armenian officials now refrain from openly condemning Baku’s actions in their public statements.
