TURKEY’S TOP CLERIC CALLS POPE’S ARMENIAN GENOCIDE COMMENTS ‘IMMORAL’
21:31, 20 Apr 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
Turkey’s top cleric on Monday described comments by Pope Francis that
the 1915 mass killing of Armenians was genocide as immoral and said
the Vatican should look to its own history before leveling accusations
of casting stones, Reuters reports.
Francis this month became the first head of the Roman Catholic church
to publicly call the killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians
“genocide”, prompting a row with Turkey, which summoned the Vatican’s
envoy and recalled its own.
“The Vatican will come out as the biggest loser if we are all giving
account for past sufferings and pain caused,” Mehmet Gormez, head of
the Religious Affairs Directorate, the highest religious authority
in largely Muslim Turkey, told Reuters in an interview.
“Is the current situation of millions of Syrian refugees much less
cause for concern to the Vatican than what happened during the Armenian
deportation?” he said, referring to refugees from Syria’s civil war
being sheltered in Turkey.
“I find the Pope’s statement immoral, and can’t reconcile it with
basic Christian values.”
Gomez said Europe’s weak economy and its difficulties integrating
immigrants were the root causes of rising Islamophobia on the
continent.
“Islamophobia should be considered a crime against humanity, just
like anti-Semitism,” he said.
Gormez also said violence carried out by groups such as Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Boko Haram, Al Shabaab and al
Qaeda was a consequence of ignorance and poverty, as well as of the
exploitation of the Middle East and Africa for two centuries.
He called on Islamic scholars and clerics to be self-critical about
how they were raising new generations.