POPE LEO XIII APPEALED TO SULTAN IN VAIN TO STOP AN EARLIER MASSACRE OF ARMENIANS

Catholic Insight

Aug 23, 2011

Armenia News reported July 11, 2011 on an appeal by Pope Leo XIII
(Pope: 1878-1903) to the Turkish sultan to stop the 1894-1896 massacre
of Armenian Christians. That appeal was recently disclosed by the
Vatican Archives.

Following the release of the “Secret Archives” dealing with Armenia,
a reporter for the Turkish Vatan newspaper interviewed Archbishop
Sergio Pagano, who is in charge of the Vatican Archives.

Archbishop Pagano “stressed that back in 1896…Pope Leo XIII called
on the Sultan to show sympathy and stop the genocide.”

“Pagano said that the documents and information about the Armenian
genocide from Vatican’s secret archives will be published in a separate
book. He cited several stories from the documents.

“An eyewitness from Erzurum said, ‘I saw how numerous children were
killed. My niece ran away from home with a two-year-old child on her
shoulders, but she was shot. When she fell on the ground two soldiers
came to her and killed her. I saw the killing of our city’s spiritual
leader. They gouged out his eyes, pulled his beard. Before killing him,
the soldiers forced him to dance.”

Another story was told by a Turkish soldier named Mustafa Suleyman:
‘We entered the Armenian villages and killed them all, without regard
to gender and age. Kurds who came with us robbed Armenian houses. Many
old Armenians, disabled people, were hiding in schools located in
the centre of the city, but we had an order and killed them. Eight
hundred Armenians were killed and burnt in Geliguzan village. They
gouged out the eyes of a priest, Fr. Hovhannes; his beard, nose,
and ears were cut off. I have not killed a single child, even saved
two of them. I was hiding them in my tent but once I went in I saw
their bodies dismembered.’

“Under the orders of bloody Sultan Abdul Hamid over 300,000 Armenians
were killed in 1894-1896.” (The Wanderer, July 21, 2011)

The massacre of these years is not to be confused with the greater
Armenian Holocaust which took place during the World War I years,
when an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed. Obviously, this
slaughter foreshadowed the larger one in 1915. Both crimes were ignored
by Europe whose nations were in deadly rivalry with one another.