ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT: ARMENIAN GENOCIDE WAS THE DRESS REHEARSAL FOR NAZI EXTERMINATION OF JEWS
15:37, 05 Mar 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
“The dress rehearsal for the Nazi extermination of the Jews took
place exactly 100 years ago, in 1915,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
writes in his weekly column on The Catholic Philly. The full article
is provided below:
“Lent is a time for self-examination and repentance; a time for good
spiritual reading and the sacrament of penance. It’s also a time for
renewing our sense of solidarity with fellow Christians around the
world. It’s a moment to remember the witness of so many Christians
who’ve died simply because they were Christian.
The world rightly remembers the mass murder of Jews and other
minorities by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In its scope,
the Shoah dwarfs anything in human history, and its echoes continue
today in the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, much of it driven by
radicalized Islam. But the Shoah was by no means the only mass murder
carried out in the 20th century.
In fact, the dress rehearsal for the Nazi extermination of the Jews
took place exactly 100 years ago, in 1915. The genocide was carried out
by Turkish authorities, and it murdered more than 1 million Armenians,
a people who were overwhelmingly Christian. Religion wasn’t the only
reason for the killings – ethnic and economic resentments of Turkey’s
Armenian minority played an important role – but Muslim contempt for
the “unbelievers” legitimized the violence and was a powerful current
throughout the killings.
Men, women and children were turned out of their homes, marched to
exhaustion and starved, beaten, hanged and burned to death by the tens
of thousands. The systematic murder campaign went on in bloody waves
into the 1920s. Witnesses recalled Turks taunting their victims with
shouts of “Where is your Christ now? Where is your Jesus? Why does
he not save you?”
To this day, Turkey has never adequately acknowledged the Armenian
genocide. As President Jimmy Carter once remarked, “there weren’t
any Nuremburg trials” for the mass murder inflicted on the Armenians.
During the Cold War, Turkey was a NATO ally. The United States and
Europe found it easier to turn a blind eye to history than to resurrect
a crime from the past.
Today, with the resurgence of militant Islam inside Turkey itself,
a full national truth-telling by Turkish authorities may be even more
remote. Armenians were the first nation in the world to formally adopt
Christianity in A.D. 301. Today, in their historic home regions of
modern Turkey, their culture and memory have been wiped out.
Every year on April 24, Armenians around the world celebrate
Remembrance Day for the victims of the 1915 genocide. This year, on
the centenary of that mass murder, Christians from every tradition
need to remember and pray for the victims of that genocide, which
remains one of the worst unrepented crimes in history.
We also need to remember that the persecution and murder of Christians
still continues at the hands of ISIS and radicalized Islam throughout
the Middle East. And to date, our national leadership has been utterly
ineffective in stopping it – or even fully engaging it.
We Americans take for granted our traditions of religious liberty,
human rights and judicial process. We see the coexistence – and even
the friendship — of different religious communities and beliefs
as quite normal. But it’s not. We too often don’t understand the
uniqueness of that gift.
Today, in many places around the world, living as a Christian invites
discrimination, hatred and violence. The beheading of Christians by
ISIS is the latest crime in a long history of Middle Eastern Christian
martyrdom – not the phony and homicidal “martyrdom” that involves
blowing up innocent women and children, but the realmartyrdom of
being murdered for one’s belief in Jesus Christ.
Lent is a time of repentance. It’s also a time for forgiving even the
wicked. But it’s also a time to remember and learn from history —
even when the whole world wants to forget it. This Lent we need to
remember and pray for the Armenian Christians who died 100 years
ago. Like us, they were part of God’s people; the people of Jesus
Christ. The memory of their suffering should turn our hearts and our
energies to helping the millions of Christians now suffering in the
Middle East and around the world.”