BBC: POPE FRANCIS’ DECLARATION WAS A BOLD DECISION COHERENT WITH HIS PHILOSOPHY

00:31, 14.04.2015
Region:World News, Armenia
Theme: Politics, Analytics

“Pope Francis, who visited Turkey last year, would have been perfectly
conscious that he would offend the moderate Muslim country by his use
of the word “genocide,” writes BBC reporter David Willey, commenting
on the declaration by Pope Francis at the Mass held on Sunday in the
Vatican, during which he acknowledged the Armenian Genocide.

“But the Pope’s powerful phrase “concealing or denying evil is
like allowing a wound to bleed without bandaging it” extended his
condemnation to all other, more recent, mass killings.

It now remains to be seen how far his remarks will impact upon the
Vatican’s future relations with moderate Muslim states. It was a bold
decision but totally coherent with Pope Francis’ philosophy of open
discussion about moral arguments.

Pope Francis’ focus today on Armenia, the first country to adopt
Christianity as its state religion, even before the conversion of
the Roman Emperor Constantine, serves as yet another reminder of the
Catholic Church’s widely spread roots in Eastern Europe and the Middle
East,” the author says.

As reported earlier, during the Mass on the occasion of the 100th
anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Pope Francis said that humanity
had lived through “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in
the last century. “The first, which is widely considered ‘the first
genocide of the 20th Century’, struck your own Armenian people.”