He said Garegin must leave the church headquarters in Echmiadzin after ten days of vicious attacks which his political foes claim is coordinated with Azerbaijan.
Pashinian began his social media campaign with allegations that Garegin and many other senior clergymen have had secret sex affairs in breach of their vows of celibacy and must therefore be defrocked. He has been focused on the Catholicos in recent days, saying that the latter must prove the opposite or step down.
In his latest Facebook post, Pashinian charged that Garegin cannot head the ancient church because he had broken his celibacy and fathered a child. He pledged to “prove that in the necessary format.” Pashinian also urged followers of the church to “unite around the agenda of liberating the Seat of the Catholicos with love and in a Christian manner.”
The church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin did not immediately and officially react to what looked like a call to occupy it. But the head of its museums and archive, Father Asoghik Karapetian, expressed concern over what he called violent actions “openly planned at the state level.”
“Are you leading the people to a clash?” Karapetian asked the government. “Do you want to fill the courtyard of the Holy Church with blood?”
“In the Armenian Church, there are no Judases who would sell out and accompany a mob against the Lord's Anointed One,” he wrote.
Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian, the outspoken head of the church diocese encompassing Armenia’s northwestern Shirak province, said the church is prepared for any scenario. “The Church continues its mission serenely,” Ajapahian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Meanwhile, Armenian opposition leaders strongly condemned Pashinian’s latest statement and reaffirmed their support for Garegin. Artur Khachatrian, a lawmaker from the opposition Hayastan bloc, claimed that Pashinian may be planning to send supporters to Echmiadzin to commit “hooligan acts” there. Other opposition figures urged their backers to be ready to converge on the church headquarters and defend the Catholicos.
Garegin received a major boost on Saturday when former President Ter-Petrosian, who rarely makes public appearances, visited him to voice what the Mother See described as “full support for His Holiness” and strongly condemn Pashinian’s “unconstitutional encroachments” against the church. Pashinian reacted furiously to the visit, branding Ter-Petrosian “the founder of the practice of election fraud” in Armenia.
The accusation is extraordinary given the fact that Pashinian played a key role in a protest movement led by Ter-Petrosian in 2007-2008. He famously declared at the time that the ex-president, who had led Armenia to independence in 1991, “always turns out to be right.”
Pashinian’s detractors say that he launched his campaign against the church at the behest of Azerbaijan. They argue that it followed Azerbaijani officials’ renewed criticism of the Armenian Church that has blamed Pashinian for the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh and denounced his unilateral concessions to Baku.
Garegin addressed late last month an international conference in Switzerland on the preservation of Karabakh’s Armenian religious and cultural heritage. He again 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. He described them as hostages.
By contrast, Pashinian and other Armenian officials now refrain from openly condemning Baku’s actions in their public statements.