The Promise, the grandest big-screen portrayal ever made about the mass killings of Armenians during World War I, has been rated by more than 111,300 people on IMDb — a remarkable total considering it doesn’t open in theatres until Friday and has thus far been screened only a handful of times publicly. The passionate reaction is Read more
Papal trips are important for many reasons, including their geopolitical significance, their meaning for relations with other Christian churches and other faiths, their impact on the local Catholic community, and the media coverage they generate. As a result, foreign trips are among the events every year in which a pope invests the most of himself Read more
Pope Francis has expressed surprise at the reaction to his decision to have a commission study the role of deaconesses in the early Church. The Pope fielded a question on the topic during a press conference on his flight to Rome from Armenia on June 26. Francis offered to have a commission after he was questioned at Read more
Turkey’s deputy prime minister says Pope Francis reflects a “crusader mentality” for once again using the word “genocide” about a 1915 massacre in Armenia. During a visit to Armenia, Francis used the word in a speech. Francis departed from a carefully prepared text to use the word. As the prepared text indicated, Francis first referred Read more
This Sunday Armenians and people of good will around the world will commemorate the victims of the Armenian Genocide. A century ago millions of men, women and children – including Assyrians and Greeks – were brutally tortured and exterminated upon the direct order and plan of the Ottoman Turkish government, thereby emptying the region of Read more
Although no date has been set, a Vatican spokesman confirmed Pope Francis is considering a trip to Armenia during the second half of June, a year after causing a diplomatic incident by calling the Ottoman-era slaughter of Armenians in the early 1900s a genocide. Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said the pope’s itinerary hasn’t been Read more
The twentieth century saw major advances in technology and communications, economy and human rights. It was also the bloodiest century in history. Think of the mass deportations, starvation and extermination of perhaps 14 million people in Stalinist Russia and even more in Maoist China; the Holocaust of 6 million Jews under the Nazis, as well Read more
A church like that can help a person, says Armen. It can help them from giving up hope — and that is indeed something. The fact that the church is even standing here — beautiful and steadfast in a place that was only recently the site of ruins — instills a sense of courage, says Read more
The Armenian and Assyrian genocide that took place between 1914 and 1923, along with the Pontian Greek mass murders, provided the template for the Holocaust: forced emigration, expulsions, property confiscations, forced labour, public torture and executions, medical experiments, elementary gassings, starvation and death marches. These resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 Armenians, perhaps Read more
When Pope Francis described the killing of more than a million Armenians a century ago as “the first genocide of the 20th century,” he was widely regarded as making a political statement. Certainly that was the view of Turkey, which recalled its ambassador to the Vatican and expressed its “great disappointment and sadness” over the pope’s Read more