The passionate reaction is because The Promise, a $100-million movie starring Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale, has provoked those who deny that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred between 1915 and 1923 by the Ottoman Empire or that the deaths of Armenians were the result of a policy of genocide.

Thousands, many of them in Turkey, have flocked to IMDb to rate the film poorly.

Though many countries and most historians call the mass killings genocide, Turkey has aggressively refused that label.

Yet that wasn't the most audacious sabotage of The Promise, a passion project of the late billionaire investor and former MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian.

In March, just a few weeks before The Promise was to open, a curiously similar-looking film called The Ottoman Lieutenant appeared.

Another sweeping romance set during the same era and with a few stars of its own, including Ben Kingsley and Josh Hartnett, The Ottoman Lieutenant seemed designed to be confused with The Promise.

But it was made by Turkish producers and instead broadcast Turkey's version of the events — that the Armenians were merely collateral damage in World War I.

It was the Turkish knockoff version of The Promise, minus the genocide.

"It was like a reverse mirror image of us," said Terry George, director and co-writer of The Promise.

George, the Irish filmmaker, has some experience in navigating the sensitivities around genocide having previously written and directed 2004's Hotel Rwanda, about the early '90s Rwandan genocide. Continue reading

• Jake Coyle is a film writer and critic.

As a result, foreign trips are among the events every year in which a pope invests the most of himself - the most time preparing speeches and gestures, the most energy in thinking about the messages he wants to convey, and so on.

All this means there's another level of interpretation every time a pope hits the road, which is what the outing reveals about his own personality and priorities.

In that light, it's worth asking what Pope Francis' June 24-26 trip to Armenia tells us about the pontiff himself. Surveying everything that happened, three conclusions suggest themselves.

Argentina matters

From the beginning, it's been striking how often Pope Francis, when pressed to explain a particular statement or policy choice, will invoke his background in Argentina.

There are really too many examples to count, but just to choose one almost at random, in a session with priests from the diocese of Rome earlier this month, Francis stirred controversy by suggesting there are cases in which it's better for couples to live together for a while rather than take part in a shotgun wedding.

"Here's a social fact in Buenos Aires," he said. "I prohibited religious marriages in Buenos Aires in cases of what we call matrimonios de apuro, meaning ‘in a hurry,' when a baby is on the way."

In fact, Francis cited his experience in Buenos Aires no fewer than five times in that address to priests, on multiple topics.

The same point emerged on the Armenia trip, especially in the press conference he held on the papal plane on his return. Francis cited Argentina on three separate points:

To explain his choice to add the word "genocide" to a speech on Friday about the massacres suffered by Armenians in 1915 at the hands of Ottoman Turks, saying that in Argentina that's just the word used and that "I brought it with me to Rome." Continue reading

Sources

• Article by John L. Allen Jr, editor of Crux
• Image: Salt + Light

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 a recent meeting with the superiors of women's religious orders.

On the papal plane on Sunday, Francis expressed surprise and some annoyance at the magnitude of the reaction to his decision.

"The next day, it was as if the Church had opened the door to women deacons, but that's not true," he said.

Francis added that the commission's primary role will be to ascertain the role of female deacons in the early Church.

"I believe this theme has been studied a lot, and it won't be difficult to shed light," the Pope said.

More important, Francis said, is making sure the voices of women are heard in decision-making processes.

"Women think in a different way than us men, and you can't make a good or correct decision without hearing women," he said.

The Pontiff said he's committed to trying to boost the role of women theologians in the Vatican.

But he noted that effort is presently on hold.

It is awaiting the absorption of the Pontifical Council for the Laity into a new department.

This department will be dedicated to laity, the family and life.

Francis dealt with several other topics at the press conference.

Among these were the Church saying sorry to homosexual people, the role of a retired pope, and his use of the word "genocide" during his visit to Armenia.

He briefly mentioned the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union.

Sources

• Crux
• Catholic News Agency: Full text of Pope Francis's in-flight interview
• Image: Associated Press

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 to the killings by their Armenian description as the Metz Yeghérn, or the "Great Evil".

He then continued: "Sadly, that tragedy - that genocide-was the first of the deplorable series of catastrophes of the past century, made possible by twisted racial, ideological or religious aims that darkened the minds of the tormentors even to the point of planning the annihilation of entire peoples."

In 1915, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire.

Last year, Francis used the word "genocide" to describe this event.

This infuriated Turkey at the time.

Ankara recalled its ambassador to the Vatican and kept him away for 10 months

Turkey waited more than 24 hours to react to the Pope's latest remark.

"Of course the Pope's statement is very unfortunate," Turkey's deputy prime minister Nurettin Canikli told reporters.

"It is unfortunately possible to see all the reflections and traces of Crusader mentality in the actions of papacy and the Pope."

The Vatican responded by saying "the Pope is on no crusade".

Spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi, SJ, said: "He is not trying to organise wars or build walls but he wants to build bridges."

"He has not said a word against the Turkish people."

The word "genocide" appeared again in a joint declaration signed by Francis and the head of the Armenian Church at the end of the Pope's visit.

On his flight back from Armenia, Francis said he had not used the word with "offensive intent".

Rather, he said, he had used the term "objectively".

Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War One.

Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War One.

But it contests the figures and denies that the killings were systematically orchestrated and constitute a genocide.

It also says many Muslim Turks perished at that time.

Sources

• Reuters
• Reuters
• National Catholic Reporter
• NPR
• Crux
• Image: Armenpress

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 its indigenous populations and deliberately destroying millennia-old Christian heritage.

Armenians were martyred also because of their Christian faith and as recently as last year the Armenian Apostolic Church canonised all the victims of the genocide as saints.

It is tragic that the cycle of genocide continues to this day in various parts of the world. Part of the reason behind it is the impunity of the past crimes and the unwillingness of the international community to undertake meaningful measure to stop it.

Only by fully facing the tragedies of the past and dealing with them in a truthful and just manner can the humanity move forward.

These ideas are enshrined in the work of a 10th-century Armenian monk, St Gregory of Narek, whom Pope Francis proclaimed a Doctor of the Church for his invaluable contributions towards the Christian theology and community at-large.

St Gregory of Narek is best-known for his work the Book of Lamentations (also called Book of Prayers), which outlines profound ideas about the purification and sanctification of humanity.

The book is a monologue structured as a prayer to God "from the depths of the heart" in which St Gregory ascribes to himself all possible sins, exposing himself and confessing to God.

The saint suggests a way of human perfection through repenting to God.

This was a revolutionary idea aimed at dispelling the ignorance of the Middle Ages. Long before Martin Luther, St Gregory advocated direct communication with God. Centuries later this idea was to become the basis of Reformation. Continue reading

Sources

• Catholic Herald, from an article by Vahan Dilanyan, the Assistant to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.
• Image: Telegraph UK

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said the pope's itinerary hasn't been finalized because organizers are still reviewing possible stops during the visit.

Italian media is reporting that the trip will occur June 22-26, but Lombardi said no dates have been set.

Francis first floated the possibility of a visit to Armenia during his return flight from his November visit to Africa, when he said he had promised the three Armenian patriarchs that he would go. "The promise has been made," he said. "I don't know if it will be possible, but I did promise."

A few months before, Argentine Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Eastern Churches, had raised the possibility of a papal visit during his own trip to Armenia, saying that the pontiff "wishes with all of his heart to go to Armenia," and that he'd already received an invitation from Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan.

Last year, Francis sparked a diplomatic incident with Turkey by celebrating a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica to mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian slaughter by the Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I and defining the massacre as the "first genocide of the 20th century."

Continue Reading

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 as gypsies, the handicapped and others; the massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Dafur.

Altogether tens of millions were killed or tortured in attempts to exterminate whole peoples and cultures.

But historians generally agree that first great genocide of the modern era - the model, in fact, for some subsequent ones - was "the great crime" of the Ottoman Empire, in which 1 to 1.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were killed.

Where, we wonder, was God in all this?

Christians believe God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good - indeed, He is goodness itself - and so never directly intends or causes evil. Human beings, on the other hand, all too often choose evil: individually they commit sins, large or small, and in concert with others they sometimes commit grave atrocities.

Human beings, not God, are responsible for those misdeeds and the terrible effects on innocent victims.

Yet, still we wonder why God permits such things, even if He does not directly will them. One traditional answer (from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas) has been: that even when God allows evils to be perpetrated, He ensures some greater good can come from them.

That can be hard to see at the time - hard, even a century later. But eventually we see the divine hand bringing good out of evil and realize things might otherwise have been even worse. We witness the blood of martyrs seeding the Church and experience divine grace conquering hatred and cruelty with reconciliation and solidarity. As the Portuguese saying goes, God writes straight with crooked lines. Continue reading

Sources

• Archbishop Anthony Fisher, ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: United Armenian Council

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 Armen.

And courage is something that is badly needed in these parts, especially in Diyarbakir.The city is located in southeastern Turkey, deep in the Anatolian mountain region. Diyarbakir is gray, loud and lackluster.

But it does have one special landmark — the stylishly restored St. Giragos Church, located in the Old Town, a labyrinth of crumbling homes and alleys that reverberate with children's shouts as they kick around a soccer ball.

It's a Christian-Armenian church, the first of its kind to be rebuilt and highly symbolic in a city like Diyarbakir.

The builders say that attempts were made to prevent the reconstruction, hinting that they may have been linked to some of the politicians involved in the project. Indeed, some felt provoked by the restoration of the church.

For others, the church is a symbol of a major political shift that has gripped Turkish society, a symbol of a willingness to confront its history.

The church also helps people to remember and reaffirm their true identity. People like Armen.

Armen Demirjan first trained to become a baker, then a truck driver, then a newspaper deliveryman and now as a parish clerk. In his early life, Armen had a different name: Abdulrahim Zarasaln.

But one day he found out that he is really Armenian and that the few members of his family who survived had been forced to convert to Islam. Armen then began a new life — one that consumed a lot of his energy. Continue reading

Source and Image

• Spiegel Online

These resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 Armenians, perhaps 250,000 Assyrian Christians and 350,000 Pontian Greeks.

The Turkish government, a last relic of nineteenth-century nationalism, maintains its odious denial that genocide even occurred.

This is at odds with the mass of historical evidence, now reaching a torrent, confirming the planned extermination of a group of people that was carried out with such brutal success.

What is not well known is the role of doctors in the genocide - another ominous precedent for the Holocaust.

Our knowledge of this comes from the distinguished Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian, who demonstrated that the genocide was largely directed and carried out by doctors, prominent members of the Ittihadist Party who came to power in a coup in 1908.

Medical personnel did not merely supervise proceedings; they were directly involved in the killings, often participating in torture.

The most prominent physicians were Dr Behaeddin Sakir and Dr Mehmett Nazim, who played pivotal roles in the establishment and deployment of the Special Organization units, extermination squads staffed by violent criminals released from prisons to undertake killings.

Sakir worked at one time as the chief physician of Soloniki Municipal Hospital and Nazim - described as "a doctor by profession and not without promise" - in what must be regarded as one of the most misguided appointments in the history of medicine, was the professor of Legal (Ethical) Medicine at Istanbul Medical School.

Utterly unrepentant to the end of his life, Nazim was thought to have been responsible for a million murders. Continue reading

• Robert M Kaplan in ABC Religion & Ethics

Robert M. Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist and author.

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 remarks.

If a religious significance was attached to the pope's comments, it was that his condemnation of killings of a Christian group resident in the Muslim Ottoman Empire resonated in the current persecution of Christians by Islamic State.

But even that analysis misses the theological significance of the pope's remarks and the ceremony at which he delivered them.

Francis spoke last Sunday at a Mass in the Vatican celebrated for Catholics of the Armenian Rite.

Present were not only the head of the Armenian Catholic Church, Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX, but also the leadership of the Armenian Apostolic Church, including Karekin II and Aram I, the two Catholicoi (patriarchs) at the top of the church's hierarchy.

The Armenian Apostolic Church, one of the most ancient Christian communities, is an "Oriental Orthodox" church, not be confused with the Eastern Orthodox Church which broke with Rome in the 11th century.

The Armenian Church parted with both Rome and Constantinople much earlier, over an abstruse theological dispute about the nature of Christ.

In recent years, however, the Armenian and other "Miaphysite" churches - another is the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt - have been engaged in theological conversations with the Vatican and Eastern Orthodox churches and the theological differences of Christianity's first millennium largely have been smoothed over.

As a 1997 joint declaration by Pope John Paul II and Armenian Catholicos Aram I Keshishian put it, the disagreements "were frequently based on historical, political, or sociocultural factors." Continue reading

• Michael McGough is the Los Angeles Times' senior editorial writer, based in Washington, D.C.

Turkey has reacted with anger to the comment made by the Pope at a service in the Armenian Catholic Rite in Rome on Sunday.

Pope Francis said that humanity had lived through "three massive and unprecedented tragedies" in the last century.

"The first, which is widely considered 'the first genocide of the 20th Century', struck your own Armenian people," he said, in a form of words used by a declaration by St John Paul II in 2001.

Armenia and many historians say up to 1.5 million people were killed by Ottoman forces in 1915.

But Turkey has always disputed that figure and said the deaths were part of a civil conflict triggered by the First World War.

Continue reading

I came to this conclusion after studying about 2,000 pages, entitled "persecuzioni contra gli Armeni", in both the Archives of the Apostolic Delegation in Constantinople and the Secretary of State in the Vatican Secret Archives for an upcoming book[1], many of them for the first time.[2]

There is no doubt that Eugenio Pacelli (who became Pius XII in 1939) was extremely well informed about this dark chapter of World War I.[3]

From 1914 he was Secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs of the Holy See's Secretariat of State. He became Undersecretary of State when Benedict XV named Cardinal Gasparri as Secretary of State.

In this position he had prime access to all information on the Armenian genocide and indeed we find his characteristic handwriting on several documents dealing with it.

Being responsible for several Papal relief initiatives during the War, he was well-informed about it. In several cases, the Apostolic Delegate in Constantinople, Msgr. Angelo Dolci, addressed Pacelli directly in his letters and reports to the Holy See.[4]

Later on, when Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as Nuncio to Bavaria, Pacelli was involved in a diplomatic intervention to prevent further massacres after the Russian retreat from northeastern Turkey following the Brest-Litovsk treaty.[5]

Indeed, all biographers of Pius XII agree that the wartime diplomacy of Pope Benedict XV served as a model for Pius XII's actions during World War II, when the "Pope of Peace"[6] served as his role model, especially in his stress on the Vatican's "impartiality".[7]

But what did Pius XII learn from his experience with the Armenian genocide? Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet
• Image: World War I in the Middle East

Now, in an annual event that grows in mythology and status in proportion to the passing of the years, is celebrated the shared combat ordeal of gallant "Johnny Turk" and the Bronzed Anzac.

And why not?

The Turkish forces, well prepared behind excellent defences, used their tactics to good effect, ably led by a professional officer who was to go on to bigger things, such as the fire destruction of Smyrna - namely, Kemal Ataturk.

But, pause for one moment to consider a slightly different scenario.

Let us suspend historical reality for the purposes of this exercise.

What if, say, instead of Gallipoli, the Anzac forces were going into combat with an SS Battalion somewhere in Poland during the Second World War?

Would we then, decades later, be joining up with our comrades in battle to celebrate what both sides had gone through, our enmities forgotten?

Can one commemorate the shared experiences with enemy forces who acted as the military arm of a state carrying out a terrible genocide at the same time?

For it was the night before the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, then called Constantinople, when occurred the arrest, detention and subsequent liquidation of 625 intellectuals, priests and leading figures of the Armenian Empire.

This event is widely held to signal the onset of the first major genocide of the twentieth century, the most blood-drenched period in human history.

What followed was a mass murder of an entirely innocent group of citizens in the Ottoman Empire by means that are still horrifying to contemplate.

By the time Turkey sued for peace in 1918, up to 1.5 million Armenians had been slaughtered, decimating the population of a group of people who had lived in the Fertile Crescent since the dawn of human settlement. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: The Guardian