Garegin was indicted on Saturday the day after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian pledged to take “additional measures” to scuttle the meeting seen as a major blow to his efforts to depose the supreme head of the church.
The accusations levelled against the Catholicos stem from his January 27 decision to defrock a bishop involved in Pashinian’s controversial campaign. Six bishops sitting on the church’s Supreme Spiritual Council are prosecuted for recommending that decision.
Garegin’s office and legal experts question the legality of the charges, saying that Armenian courts and law-enforcement authorities have no jurisdiction over internal church affairs. They say the criminal proceedings are designed to prevent the conference of bishops in the Austrian city of Sankt Polten scheduled for February 16-19.
The conference was originally scheduled to take place in Echmiadzin from December 10-12. Garegin postponed it because of what his office described as “repressions against clergy.” The Mother See gave the same reason for the subsequent decision to move it abroad.
Archbishop Natan Hovannisian, the head of the Mother See’s External Relations and Protocol Department, said on Monday that although the meeting will go ahead as planned its status will be downgraded from an official “episcopal assembly to a “gathering of bishops” due to Garegin’s inability to attend it.
“The gathering can submit the conclusions of its discussions to the Mother See,” Hovannisian said, adding that neither the Catholicos nor the indicted bishops, including himself, will participate in it via video link.
“Some 20 bishops have already arrived in Austria,” Bishop Tiran Petrosian, the Armenian patriarchal legate in Central Europe, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service from Vienna. “Others are expected to arrive later in the day.”
All 56 bishops and archbishops of the Armenian Church were invited last month to Sankt Polten to discuss “challenges facing the church and ways of overcoming them.” Ten of them openly broke the ranks in late November to join in Pashinian’s campaign.
The rebel bishops allied to Pashinian denounced the decision to hold the meeting outside Armenia. However, one of them, Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, said afterwards that he will attend it. Derderian heads a church diocese in the western United States.
Petrosian said only two bishops participating in the meeting are based in Armenia. The other participants represent church dioceses in Armenian Diaspora communities around the world. The Lebanon-based Catholicos Aram I, the number two figure in the church hierarchy, is understood to have cancelled his participation due to the travel ban imposed on Garegin. According to the legate, he has sent a message of support to Sankt Polten..
Critics say Pashinian sought to prevent the rescheduled gathering because it will almost certainly demonstrate that the Catholicos continues to enjoy the top clergy’s backing.
The Armenian premier indicated his intention to scuttle it on Friday when he reacted furiously to a joint statement by eight prominent members of the Armenian communities in the United States and Europe condemning his “attacks” on the church. He accused the signatories, among them four billionaires, of plotting to remove the seat of the Catholicos from Armenia and seizing church treasures kept in Echmiadzin. Pashinian offered no proof of the allegation laughed off by Hovannisian.
“The Mother See had returned to Echmiadzin in 1441… and the Mother See will forever remain in Armenia,” insisted the indicted archbishop.
The unprecedented accusations filed against Garegin have drawn strong condemnation from Armenia’s main opposition groups as well as some Diaspora groups, notably an umbrella structure representing France’s influential Armenian community.
In a weekend statement, the Coordination Council of Armenian Organizations of France (CCAF) strongly condemned the Armenian government’s “repressions” against the church and demanded an immediate end to the “illegal” criminal proceedings against the Catholicos and the six other clergymen. The CCAF also voiced its “full and unwavering support” for Garegin.
Pashinian said until December that Garegin and other top clerics at odds with him must go because they had secret sex affairs in breach of their vows of celibacy. He then began accusing them of spying for a foreign country, presumably Russia. His latest allegations directed at Diaspora figures in the West raised even more questions about his real motives.
Pashinian began his campaign last May right after Garegin accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during an international conference in Switzerland. His detractors say he wants to please Azerbaijan or neutralize a key source of opposition to his unilateral concessions to Armenia’s arch-foe.
