HEAD OF ARMENIAN CHURCH VISITS CARROLLTON SANCTUARY: CARROLLTON: ARMENIAN CHURCH’S LEADER VISITS CONGREGATION DURING U.S. TOUR
by Jeffrey Weiss, The Dallas Morning News
The Dallas Morning News (Texas)
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
October 20, 2007 Saturday
Oct. 20–The Catholicos of All Armenians finished his animated talk
to the youth of the small Carrollton church. Any questions? he asked
in Armenian.
An 11-year-old girl boldly raised her hand. Can a woman ever hold
your job as the spiritual leader of the worldwide Armenian Church?
Karekin II smiled and told her no. "Blame it on the boys," he said to
laughter. Women, he said, can aspire to a higher honor: to be mothers
like Mary, the mother of Jesus.
That’s not a question he gets back in Armenia, he said later through
a translator. "The question of women serving as clergy is not at the
top of anyone’s mind-set."
But that kind of question — American culture colliding with his
ancient Christian tradition — is why Karekin II is on a five-week
tour of the United States.
The catholicos is to many Armenians a religious figure similar to
what the pope is to Catholics. He also is like the Dalai Lama is
to Tibetans: both a widely revered religious figure and a cultural
symbol. He is here to reinforce Armenian traditions in a land where
Old World customs can vanish in a generation.
His visit includes cities with tens of thousands of Armenian-Americans,
such as New York, Detroit and Chicago. But he spent Thursday and Friday
in North Texas, where the modest St. Sarkis Armenian Church, set in
a working-class Carrollton neighborhood, is the lone congregation in
his tradition.
The church gets about 100 worshippers on an average Sunday. The
members discovered to their shock several months ago that they would
host their pontiff.
"Initially, for one brief second, we might have said, ‘How are we
going to pull this off?’ " Raffi Gostanian said.
Meticulous preparation
But that second quickly passed. A committee was formed, an itinerary
developed. Their pontiff would meet the church’s children Thursday
night, have lunch with local religious leaders Friday, visit the
Dallas Holocaust Center in the afternoon and lead a prayer service
Friday night.
They attended to every detail — even drove the route between his hotel
and the church during rush hour to make sure he could arrive on time.
The Thursday night event was where Rita Katanjian got to ask her
question. She came up with the query in the car on the way, she said
later, wondering if she could aspire to become catholicos. She didn’t
seem crushed by his answer.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience," she said, vowing to come
to church more often and read her Bible more.
Religious adherence was only half of Karekin II’s message.
"Our mission is to lead our people to God," he said later. "But the
path which we travel, we shall travel according to our national way,
our culture and traditions, and our national values."
His visit to St. Sarkis is a message to his larger church that all
Armenians are important, he said, in the same way that Jesus taught
that one lost sheep was as important as the other 99 in the flock.
Armenian tradition holds that the Armenian people descended directly
from the family of Noah, after the Ark landed on Mount Ararat. The
mountain is in what is now Turkey, a fact that Armenians include on
a long list of sad realities for them.
Another item on that list was splashed across headlines worldwide as
Karekin II arrived, when a U.S. House committee voted to condemn the
deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 as genocide by Turkey.
Karekin II was in the gallery for the committee vote — an event that
was not planned for his visit.
But it wasn’t a coincidence, he said in Dallas. "We see it as nothing
but divine providence."
Turkish officials say the deaths were part of a larger war, not
genocide, and they are fighting passage of the resolution by the full
House. Some Americans say the vote would not be worth the damage to
relations between the U.S. and Turkey. Karekin II disagreed.
"Morality should never be sacrificed for political interests," he said.
At St. Sarkis, a photo of an eternal flame in memory of the 1915 dead
hangs on the wall of the social hall.
About St. Sarkis
The Carrollton church was founded in 1991. The congregation claims
members from as far away as Waco and beyond the Oklahoma state line,
hungry for a spiritual link to their ancestral homeland.
The church has Armenian language classes, and most of the 60 or so
children who met Thursday with Karekin II said they understood at
least the gist of his talk. And they had already learned much of his
history lesson.
The Armenian Church traces its origins to the decades after the death
of Jesus, when, tradition says, the first Christians came to the
area. The king of Armenia declared Christianity the national religion
in 301, making it the first country to officially become Christian.
At St. Sarkis, most members are first- or second-generation. Many
adults are fluent in Armenian, though the spouses are from different
ethnic groups.
The leaders of the church realize that it is a struggle to pass their
love of Armenia to children whose lives are filled with the Internet,
shopping malls and the latest pop craze.
Sylvia Simonian chairs the church committee that coordinated the
pontiff’s visit. "I wonder 10 years down the road," she said, "if my
kids will be doing what we’re doing?"
THE ARMENIAN CHURCH
Based: Vagharshapat, Armenia
Membership: About 9 million worldwide, more than 800,000 in the U.S.
History: Tradition holds that the first Christians arrived in Armenia
a decade after the death of Jesus. In A.D. 301, the Armenian king
proclaimed Christianity the official religion of Armenia, making
it the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion. The
Armenian Church split from what became the Catholic Church in 451
over disagreements about the nature of Christ and questions about
political authority.
Leadership: His Holiness Karekin II has the title of "Supreme Patriarch
and Catholicos of All Armenians." He was elected by the church’s
National Ecclesiastical Assembly in 1999. He is in the middle of an
18-city, 30-day visit to the U.S.