The gathering was originally scheduled to take place in Echmiadzin from December 10-12. Garegin’s office located there postponed it because of what it described as “repressions against clergy.” The postponement followed the arrest on December 4 of a fourth senior clergyman critical of the Armenian government. Archbishop Arshak Khachatrian, the head of the Mother See Chancellery, is facing a drug-related charge rejected by him as politically motivated.
Father Yesayi Artenian, the Mother See spokesman, said on Tuesday that the bishops’ conference to be chaired by Garegin will take place in the Austrian city of Sankt Polten from February 16-19.
“It was decided to hold it in outside Armenia, in Austria, for the same reason: the campaign unleashed against the church and the pressure on clergy,” Artenian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Sargis Khandanian, a senior lawmaker representing the ruling Civil Contract party, criticized the decision and denied any government pressure exerted on the church.
“This is also a fact and argument in favor of the claim that those people who make these decisions are putting themselves outside Armenia and their goal is not to contribute to Armenia’s independence, sovereignty, or increasing its international reputation, among other goals,” he said.
In Artenian’s words, all 56 bishops and archbishops of the Armenian Church have been invited to gather there and discuss “these challenges facing the church and ways of overcoming them.”
They include the ten clerics who openly broke the ranks in late November to join in Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s controversial campaign to oust the supreme head of the church. One of them, Archbishop Mkrtich Abrahamian, said he does “not know yet” whether he will accept the invitation.
Pashinian issued on January 3 a joint statement with the renegade bishops in which he pledged to keep up the pressure on Garegin II in his official capacity as prime minister. The move added to his critics’ accusations that he is violating constitutional provisions guaranteeing the independence of the ancient church and its separation from the state. The premier denies the accusations.
On January 10, Garegin dismissed another rebel bishop, Gevorg Saroyan, as primate of the church’s Masyatsotn Diocese encompassing the town of Masis and other parts of the southern Ararat province. With Pashinian’s encouragement, Saroyan refused to obey the decision and went on to challenge it in court.
In an unprecedented injunction, a district court ruled at the weekend that Saroyan must be reinstated pending its verdict on the lawsuit. The Mother See and legal experts dismissed the order, saying that Armenian courts have no jurisdiction over the Catholicos’s unlimited authority to name and replace diocese heads.
Rev. Ruben Zargarian, the new primate named by Garegin, is reportedly backed by the vast majority of nearly three dozen parish priests serving at the Masyatsotn Diocese. But he has still not been able to enter the primate’s headquarters in Masis. Police officers remain deployed around the building in an apparent effort to help Saroyan continue to occupy it.
On Tuesday, Zargarian’s office said that local government officials and other Pashinian loyalists in two provincial communities are pressuring local priests to pledge allegiance to the sacked bishop. It claimed that some of them were warned that they will be forced out of their churches if they remain loyal to the Catholicos. Saroyan could not be reached for comment on the claims.
