Pope Francis wraps up Armenia trip amid Turkey tensions

Pope Francis wrapped up his trip to Armenia with an open-air liturgy and a visit to the Orthodox country’s closed border with Turkey amid new tensions with Ankara over his recognition of the 1915 “genocide”.

Turkey issued a harsh rebuttal late yesterday to Francis’s declaration that the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago was planned genocide.

Turkish deputy prime minister Nurettin Canikli said the comments bore the hallmarks of the “mentality of the Crusades”.

Turkey rejects the term genocide, saying the 1.5m deaths cited by historians is an inflated figure and that people died on both sides as the Ottoman Empire collapsed amid the First World War.

Yesterday, Francis participated in an open-air liturgy at the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Etchmiadzin, the seat of the nation’s Oriental Orthodox church.

The landlocked nation of 3m was the first in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion in 301.

The Armenian Apostolic church and a few other Oriental Orthodox churches split from the Catholic church in a theological dispute over the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ.

While still divided over the primacy of the Pope, the two have friendly relations . That said, there have been tensions: Francis and Karekin were supposed to have signed a joint declaration on their improved ties at the end of the visit, but it was axed at the last minute.

Vatican spokesman the Rev Federico Lombardi has said only the time simply was not right to finalise the text.

The two men also showed clear political differences during a prayer meeting on Saturday night: While Francis spoke of the need for Armenians to move on to reconcile with Turkey, Karekin insisted in a fiery speech on the need for Turkey to acknowledge its past and for Armenians to find justice for past wrongs.