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Catholic World News News Feature

Armenian Catholics Celebrate Jubilee at Vatican April 25, 2000

VATICAN (CWNews.com) -- The former Armenian Catholic Patriarch of Cilicia, Jean-Pierre XVIII Kasparian, led the Jubilee celebration of the Armenian Catholic Church at the Vatican on April 24.

The date chosen for that celebration coincided with the day on which Armenians all around the world commemorate the genocidal massacres of 1915 and thereafter, which wiped out a substantial portion of their people. (Over 1 million Armenians were killed in concentration camps or died of hunger and disease between 1915 and 1918, as the "Young Turks" of the Ottoman Empire forcibly moved the entire Armenian population from their original homeland on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to a new land on the other side of modern-day Turkey, just south of Georgia and east of Azerbaijan.)

About 300 members of Rome's small Armenian Catholic community participated in the Easter Monday ceremonies at the Vatican, with a procession through the Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica, and a celebration of the Divine Liturgy in the Armenian rite, in the smaller church of St. Anne.

The Armenian Catholic Church traces her origins back to the Crusades, when the Christian armies made their way through Armenia on their way to the Holy Land. There are about 345,000 Armenian Catholics in the world today; the Armenian Apostolic Church, which broke from Rome at the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, is much larger, with about 6 million faithful.

The Armenian Catholic Church is headed by a patriarch, whose base is now in Beirut. Patriarch Jean-Pierre XVIII Kasparian held that post from 1982 until his retirement last year. In October 1999 the Armenian Synod elected his successor, Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX.