Although legend claims that the origin of the Armenian people goes back to Noah, it seems that the Armenians became a people only in the sixth century B.C., around Mount Ararat, in the rugged mountains of the Caucasus. The Armenian people were formed by the fusion of the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu with Indo-European tribes that came from Phrygia. The first historical notice we have of the existence of this people is a cuneiform inscription from the time of the Achaemenids, the Persian dynasty founded by Cyrus, around the year 550 B.C. In the second century B.C., the Armenians were already constituted as an independent state. One of their kings, Tigranes the Great (95-55 B.C.), conquered Cappadocia and extended his dominions as far as Phoenicia on the Mediterranean coast. This extraordinary expansion was very brief, since in 67 B.C. Tigranes was defeated by the Romans.
| Armenians in the World | |
| Armenia | 3.000.000 |
| Georgia | 500.000 |
| Europe | 500.000 |
| North America | 400.000 |
| Lebanon | 200.000 |
| Iran | 100.000 |
| Syria | 100.000 |
| Turkey | 50.000 |
| Others | 50.000 |
Around the year 299, King Tiridates II (287-330) converted to Christianity through the work of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, proclaiming Christianity the state religion. From that date onward, the Christian faith, together with the Armenian language, would be among the most dynamic components of the national soul.
Conquered in the year 642 by the Muslims with fire and sword, the country was occupied only superficially, in such a way that it remained free from Islamization. From the ninth century onward, the local Bagratid dynasty, whose capital was Ani, secured for Armenia a relative prosperity and a notable artistic renaissance. Conquered in 1071 by the Seljuk Turkish hordes that devastated all Armenia, part of the nation, with its princes at the head, emigrated to Byzantine lands, settling in the Taurus mountains and in Cilicia. There they founded the principality of Lesser Armenia, which would last from 1080 to 1375. It had very close relations with the Crusaders, to whom the Armenians gave military aid. In Edessa an Armenian-Frankish principality was established, lasting half a century.
A martyr people
The Armenian communities of Greater Armenia and Lesser Armenia came, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one after another, under the domination of the Ottoman Turks, under whom the Armenians lived with relative prosperity thanks to their enterprising character and love of work. Problems appeared in the middle of the last century, when the ideas of equality, progress, and autonomy arriving from the West spread among the minority Christian populations of the Turkish empire. The concrete application of these ideas of liberty would lead the Armenian people to genocide. Indeed, in 1894 a rumor of an “Armenian plot” spread throughout the Turkish peninsula of Anatolia. The reaction of the Turks was brutal: at least 300,000 Armenians were murdered, while 100,000 emigrated outside the empire. New massacres in Adana and Antioch in 1909 were the prelude to the genocide of the Armenian people by the Turks during the First World War, 1915-1918. More than a million and a half Armenians lost their lives in this tragedy, and 200,000, mainly women and children, were forcibly Islamized. As many others fled the land of their birth.
Once the war and the massacres had ended, the Armenians of the Caucasus, under Russian rule for a century, took advantage of the Bolshevik revolution, which dismantled the foundations of the state, to proclaim an independent Armenia on May 28, 1918. Independence lasted until May 29, 1920, when the country was occupied by the Turks and the Soviets.
The Armenians who had escaped the Turkish genocide settled mainly in Syria and Lebanon, then under French mandate, where little by little they reconstituted their community institutions.
The fall of communism in Armenia made it possible in 1991 to realize the ancient dream: the independence of Hayastan (the land of the Hayk, Armenians). Armenia is today a small republic of 3,300,000 inhabitants, with its capital at Yerevan and an area of 29,000 square kilometers. It should be kept in mind that the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 had assigned it 72,000 square kilometers.
It is worth noting, as a curious fact, that the current president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian, was baptized in the Franciscan church of the Holy Land in Kesab, Syria, and completed his primary studies in the parish school of the same locality.
The beginnings of the Armenian Church
Tradition relates that it was the apostles Bartholomew and Jude Thaddeus who evangelized Armenia. It is more certain that the evangelization was the work of missionaries from Syria and Cappadocia. It was so vigorous that around the year 299 King Tiridates II converted to Christianity with his people. The promoter of this change was Saint Gregory the Illuminator, the most outstanding figure of Armenian Christianity, a good administrator and builder of the cathedral of Etchmiadzin, the holy city of the Armenians.
Initially attached to the metropolis of Caesarea of Cappadocia, in Roman territory, the Armenian Church proclaimed itself autonomous at the beginning of the fifth century under the jurisdiction of a kind of patriarch who took the title of catholicos. This title was originally given to the head of a Christian community outside the limits of the Roman-Byzantine empire, outside the jurisdiction of the patriarchs. Today the heads of the Armenian, Nestorian, and Georgian Churches retain this title.
From the fourth century onward, Armenian ecclesiastical institutions were consolidated and the liturgy took shape, strongly influenced by that of the ancient rite of Jerusalem. At the same time, the Armenian alphabet was created, which tradition attributes to the monk Mesrop (360-440), making it possible to translate into the national language the liturgical texts written until then in Greek and Syriac.
The Armenian Church separates from the Catholic Church
At Chalcedon, in the year 451, an ecumenical council was held which defined two natures in Christ, the divine and the human, in one person. Although the Armenian Church did not take part in the conciliar debates because it was absorbed in internal dissensions, the council’s decisions were received with suspicion, given the active participation of the Byzantine imperial power in the council’s conclusions.
This factor, together with that of the Monophysite bishops (who held one single nature in Christ) who came from Syria and were the first to inform the Armenian prelates of the conciliar decisions, and together with the problems of translating the Greek theological terms “nature” and “person” into the national language, pushed the Armenian Church to reject the decisions of Chalcedon and therefore to separate from the Catholic Church. Two national councils, the first held in 506 and the other in 551, confirmed the rejection of Chalcedon and the adoption of the Monophysite faith. Only some of the Armenian bishops rejected the condemnation of the decisions of Chalcedon, which gave rise to a schism within the Armenian Church that would last until the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when the Latin Church, represented by the Crusaders, awakened unionist tendencies among the Armenians. Thus the catholicos Nerses IV (1166-1173) devoted his life to a rapprochement among Armenians, Greeks, and Latins. During the first half of the thirteenth century, an ephemeral union with Rome was reestablished. It was the time when Dominicans and Franciscans set out to evangelize the regions of Lesser Armenia, converting many to Roman Catholicism but without forming a parallel Catholic Church. During the Council of Florence, in 1439, the Armenian legates signed the act of union with Rome. However, this decision had no practical effects.
A Church with four patriarchs
Until the eleventh century the Armenian Church was united under a single patriarch, the catholicos of Etchmiadzin. From the great Armenian exodus to Cilicia, where the principality of Lesser Armenia was founded in 1073, the catholicos of Etchmiadzin left his see in the Caucasus to settle in the new Armenian homeland. In 1293 he settled in the capital, Sis of Cilicia.
Twenty years later, exactly in 1311, the Armenian bishop of Jerusalem, displeased with the rapprochement between the Armenians of Cilicia and Rome, took the title of patriarch, officially confirmed by the sultan of Egypt. A century later, in 1441, it was the turn of the Armenians of the Caucasus, who, feeling the need to provide their holy city Etchmiadzin with a new spiritual head, appointed a new catholicos with authority over the Armenians of Greater Armenia. The fourth patriarch originated under the domination of the Ottoman Turks. Some years after the conquest of Constantinople, the Turks favored the institution of a patriarchate in the capital, in 1461, with civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction over all the Armenians of the empire.
In this way the Armenian Orthodox Church remains divided into four autonomous structures to this day: the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin (the Primatial Church), the Catholicos of Sis, and the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Constantinople, among which the only organic bond is the recognition of the primacy of honor of the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin.
The Catholicos of Sis, founded in 1293, remained until the year 1921. At that date, for lack of faithful, murdered in the genocide of the years 1915-1918, the patriarch transferred his see first to Aleppo and then, in 1930, to Antelias, north of Beirut, where he resides today. He has jurisdiction over the Armenians of Lebanon, Syria, and part of the diaspora, numbering in all about 400,000 persons.
The patriarch of Jerusalem has jurisdiction over the Armenians of the Holy Land and Jordan (4,000 faithful). He resides in the monastery of Saint James the Greater in Jerusalem, the religious and social center of the Armenians of the Holy Land. Indeed, around this monastery a neighborhood entirely inhabited by Armenians has grown up, with its churches, seminary, schools, associations, library of 50,000 volumes, printing press, and museum of religious art. The patriarch of Jerusalem is elected by the Brotherhood of Saint James, composed of 60 members, among them the monks of the monastery; the rest are laymen. He is assisted by four bishops, the first of whom bears the title of Grand Sacristan and is at the same time superior of the monastery. The patriarchate owns the following sanctuaries: two chapels in the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre and another in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Church of Saint James the Greater erected over the place of his martyrdom, and the houses of Annas and Caiaphas. It is co-owner with the Franciscans and the Greeks of the Tomb of the Lord and the Grotto of the Nativity.
The Armenian Catholic Church
The Armenian Catholic Church was not born in the mountains of the Caucasus like its Orthodox sister, also called Gregorian, but in the Arabized environments of Syria and Lebanon, far from the influence of the two catholicoi, that of Etchmiadzin and that of Sis. The origin of this Church is the fruit of the apostolic zeal displayed, from the sixteenth century onward, by Jesuit, Carmelite, and Capuchin missionaries.
Conversion was facilitated by the fact that there were no serious theological divergences between the Orthodox Armenians and the Armenian Catholics, since the Monophysitism of the former is only nominal. Hence Orthodox Armenians are not considered heretics but only schismatics, that is, separated from the universal Church.
In 1740 a synod of Armenian bishops united to Rome elected the first Catholic patriarch of the Armenian rite in the person of the Archbishop of Aleppo, Abraham Ardzivian, who had been removed from his see for having embraced the Catholic faith.
Having received confirmation from the Pope, the new patriarch settled provisionally in Kraim, in Lebanon. His successor established in 1749 the official residence in the monastery of Saint Mary of Bzommar, in the Lebanese mountains. At the same time the episcopal structures of the new Church began to develop in Aleppo, Palestine, Cilicia, Anatolia, and Upper Mesopotamia. Meanwhile the Orthodox Church strongly resisted the Catholic one and did not hesitate to appeal to the Ottoman secular arm to reduce the “rebels of the Armenian nation”. Only in 1831 would the Armenian Catholics obtain from the sultan the right to withdraw from the authority of the Orthodox patriarch on whom they depended civilly. The Catholic patriarch Peter IX for the first time accumulated in his person the two powers, religious and civil, of the Catholic community and established his see in Constantinople, where it would remain until 1928.
The First World War was also disastrous for the Armenian Catholics of Turkish Anatolia, who practically disappeared from the map, for which reason the patriarchal see was transferred to Bzommar.
The jurisdiction of the Catholic patriarch, today in the person of John XVIII Kasparian, extends over all the Armenian Catholics of the East and of the diaspora. It includes four archdioceses: Beirut, Aleppo, Istanbul, and Baghdad; eight dioceses: Damascus and Qamishli in Syria, Isfahan in Iran, Alexandria in Egypt, Athens, Romania, and France, in addition to three exarchates: Jerusalem, Argentina, and the United States. In independent Armenia there is a Catholic archbishop with the title of “Archbishop of the Armenians of Sebaste”.
To this Church belongs the congregation of the Mekhitarists, divided into two branches: that of the island of San Lazzaro in Venice, founded in 1717, and that of Vienna in Austria, founded in 1800; in addition to the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, founded in 1852.
In Jerusalem the Catholic patriarchate is represented by a bishop, without clergy, with the title of exarch, with jurisdiction over the Armenian Catholics of the Holy Land (about 400) and Jordan. The episcopal residence is at the Fourth Station of the Way of the Cross, where it owns the adjoining church dedicated to “Our Lady of the Spasm”.
Since the nineteenth century there have also been Protestant Armenians, gathered in the “Union of Armenian Evangelical Churches”. Their number is estimated at about 150,000.
In a joint declaration signed in Rome on December 13, 1996, between His Holiness John Paul II and the Armenian Orthodox Patriarch, Karekin I, catholicos of all Armenians, the two parties agreed in affirming one faith in Christ: Christ “is God, perfect in his divinity and perfect man in his humanity… His divinity is united to his humanity in the Person of the Only-begotten Son of God, in a real, perfect union, without confusion, without alteration, without division, without any form of separation”. The two parties therefore declare that “the controversies and deplorable divisions resulting from the different ways of expressing the faith must not continue from now on to influence negatively the life of the Church today”. The Christological controversies that gave rise to the division between the two Churches 15 centuries ago therefore belong to the past.
By Fr. Ignacio Peña
