The Colonialist Papacy - it has to be fiction because it certainly is not fact!

This column appeared in the Turkish right-wing and pro-government Daily Sabah.

I am willing to take a guess that this flight of fancy was prompted by Pope Francis' homily last week on the occasion of the Centenary of the Armenian Genocide.  The Turkish government responded with some less than helpful comments.  I find it somewhat ironical that Francis' use of the word "genocide" was from a reference made by Pope St John Paul II in 2001. (See below)

Ihsan Aktas has written an appalling piece of non-historical propaganda.  He places all the wrongs of western colonialism, and I agree, there are many, at the feet of the papacy.  How bizarre.  Using the time-tested method of "cherry picking" the pieces of historical data that best suit the predetermined conclusion, Mr Aktas attempts to make a judgement in a few hundred words on issues that need far greater depth and attention. He appears woefully ignorant not only of the role of the pope within the church, but of the entire complex history of Pius XII and the Holocaust.  Enough said.

In Australia an Assyrian Memorial in the western Sydney suburb of Bonnyrigg was vandalised with anti-Assyrian, anti-Armenian and antisemitic graffiti.  Efforts by some local Turkish community groups to prevent the memorial's construction in 2010  were frustrated because of considerable community and government support for the memorial.

Turkey has nothing to lose by acknowledging the history of the Armenian genocide.  Denial and denialism only fuels more tension, hurt and nurtures hatreds.  Turkey has everything to gain by acknowledging the past; it will help heal old wounds and promote openness and understanding and create a way forward that is honest and built on truth.  2015 is an opportunity not to be missed; but the language from Istanbul suggests the old pattern of denial remains firmly entrenched. 

And in today's Sydney Morning Herald there is an article on the Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu​, saying that the European Community's call for Turkey to acknowledge the atrocities against the Armenians as genocide is tantamount to an act of racism.  Again the Pope's comments figured in the article.

So what did Francis say?

Dear Armenian brothers and sisters,

Dear brothers and sisters.

On a number of occasions I have spoken of our time as a time of war, a third world war which is being fought piecemeal, one in which we daily witness savage crimes, brutal massacres and senseless destruction. Sadly, today too we hear the muffled and forgotten cry of so many of our defenceless brothers and sisters who, on account of their faith in Christ or their ethnic origin, are publicly and ruthlessly put to death – decapitated, crucified, burned alive – or forced to leave their homeland.

Today too we are experiencing a sort of genocide created by general and collective indifference, by the complicit silence of Cain, who cries out: “What does it matter to me? Am I my brother’s keeper?” (cf. Gen 4:9; Homily in Redipuglia, 13 September 2014).

In the past century our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies. The first, which is widely considered “the first genocide of the twentieth century” (John Paul II and Karekin II, Common Declaration, Etchmiadzin, 27 September 2001), struck your own Armenian people, the first Christian nation, as well as Catholic and Orthodox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks. Bishops and priests, religious, women and men, the elderly and even defenceless children and the infirm were murdered. The remaining two were perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism. And more recently there have been other mass killings, like those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia. It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood. It seems that the enthusiasm generated at the end of the Second World War has dissipated and is now disappearing. It seems that the human family has refused to learn from its mistakes caused by the law of terror, so that today too there are those who attempt to eliminate others with the help of a few and with the complicit silence of others who simply stand by. We have not yet learned that “war is madness”, “senseless slaughter” (cf. Homily in Redipuglia, 13 September 2014).

Dear Armenian Christians, today, with hearts filled with pain but at the same time with great hope in the risen Lord, we recall the centenary of that tragic event, that immense and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forebears had to endure. It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honour their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester. Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it!

I greet you with affection and I thank you for your witness.

With gratitude for his presence, I greet Mr Serž Sargsyan, the President of the Republic of Armenia.

My cordial greeting goes also to my brother Patriarchs and Bishops: His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians; His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, His Beatitude Nerses Bedros XIX, Patriarch of Cilicia of Armenian Catholics; and Catholicosates of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Patriarchate of the Armenian Catholic Church.

In the firm certainty that evil never comes from God, who is infinitely good, and standing firm in faith, let us profess that cruelty may never be considered God’s work and, what is more, can find absolutely no justification in his Holy Name. Let us continue this celebration by fixing our gaze on Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, victor over death and evil!

Pope Francis with Armenian Catholic Patriarchs 2015

ANZAC Day and Armenia 1915-2015.

Last week my colleague, Vicken Babkenian, published this essay on John Mendaue's blog Pearls and Irritations.  Vicken kindly gave permission for me to publish his excellent essay on my blog.

I offer it in the context of doing what historians do; namely to seek the truth of our past through thorough and diligent research.  Vicken has done this and continues to do it.  He writes of terrible things with a clear and objective tone.  There is no hysteria, no recriminations and no aggression.  He tells the story as it was.  There will be reaction and most of it will be along the lines of historical discourse, debating over interpretation, nuance and clarification.  This is what historians also do.  However there will most likely be other reactions.  These come from sources that have nothing to do with history, but with "denialism".  The only fitting reply is to ignore them and not engage.  I have encountered this with the Holocaust, I encounter it with Pope Pius XII "canonise him now" people, I am sure I will encounter it in other areas as well.

In 2005 I visited Turkey and spent a week on a history tour that incorporated Gallipoli.  Of the many happy memories I have of this beautiful country, of which I saw only a fraction, the most significant were encounters with Turkish people who showed wonderful hospitality.  I remember the driver of our tour bus who had very little English, coming up beside me as I stood looking over the beach at ANZAC Cove.  Without a word he pressed a Gallipoli pine nut into my hand, closed my fingers over it and walked away. His gesture left me with tears.  

My grandfather, Walter Henry O'Shea landed on that little beach sometime on the morning of 25 April 1915.  He was there for the entire campaign until the evacuation order was given in December.  90 years later I became the first of my family to stand there and honour his memory.  In a week or so my sister will join thousands of Australians to honour granddad and the other thousands who fought, survived and died on that peninsula in this centenary year of the landings.  I honour the soldiers of the Ottoman Empire who fought at Gallipoli; men from across the empire including Turks.

Turkey and Australia have enjoyed a mutual and warm relationship since those days.  Australians of Turkish descent have contributed to the multi-cultural and multi-faith fabric of Australian life; they have enriched us.  Acknowledgement of our histories can only make us stronger and more resilient in the face of attacks from the forces of denialism.  Accepting as historical fact events that occurred in the past is one of the first steps towards healing.  This was the point Pope Francis made at the Liturgy in St Peter's Basilica last Sunday to mark the Centenary of the Armenian Genocide.


I encourage you to read Vicken's essay.

Leading up to the Gallipoli centenary, a growing trend emerged in Australia of presenting the ‘other side’ of the story. From popular books, official histories, films and academic conferences, the ‘Turkish’ perspective of Gallipoli became widely told.[1] According to this perspective, as illustrated in a recent article by Dr Jennifer Lawless, the allied landing at Gallipoli was an invasion of the ‘Turkish homeland’ and by the end of the campaign, many more ‘Turks’ (87,000) than Anzacs (8700) died.[2] The campaign is portrayed as an almost wholly Turkish and Australian affair, contributing to the birth of both nations and a symbol of a centenary of friendship.[3] A deeper understanding of the history, however, reveals that many of these narratives are anachronistic interpretations, promoting nationalist agendas with fundamental errors and omissions.

In reality, when the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, they were part of an Anglo- French invasion of the Ottoman Empire, not Turkey. The republic of Turkey was not established until 1923. Like the British and French imperial forces, the Ottoman Army reflected the multi-ethnic make up of the Ottoman Empire. While most of the officers were ethnic Turks, the army included large numbers of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Circassians and Jews. According to Australian military historian Bill Sellars ‘two thirds of the troops who made up Colonel Mustafa Kemal’s 19th Division that faced the first wave of the Allied invasion were Syrian Arabs’.[4] A more comparable casualty comparison should be made between the empires and not ‘Turks’ v Anzacs.

During the war, the Ottoman Empire was led by a dictatorial triumvirate of Young Turks – Enver, Talaat and Djemal. Since coming to power in a violent coup in 1913, the Young Turks had been pursuing a policy of ethnic and religious homogenisation of the empire in order to create a ‘Turkey for the Turks’. The Young Turk participation in the First World War on the side of Germany allowed them to speedily accomplish this goal under the cover of war.

‘Gallipoli’, derived from the Greek word for ‘beautiful city’, was historically a Greek peninsula but had been absorbed by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. Just two weeks prior to the Anzac landings, the Ottoman authorities deported about 22,000 of the peninsula’s native Greek population into the interior of Anatolia (current day Turkey). [5]Many would die of harsh conditions. This was only a precursor to the larger persecutions to follow. Triggered by what many scholars argue was the impending landing by the Anglo-French forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, the Young Turk government arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals in the capital of the Empire, Constantinople (now Istanbul), on 24 April 1915. This marked the beginning of what Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1915, described as a ‘campaign of race extermination’. As a representative of a neutral nation, Morgenthau stood at a critical juncture in the flow of information. His key informants were US diplomats, missionaries and businessmen stationed throughout the Ottoman Empire.

In almost every town and village in the Empire, the Armenian population was arrested and deported by orders from the central government in Constantinople. The men were in most cases killed just outside their towns and villages. A much worse fate awaited the women and children. After being uprooted from their homes, they were forced to walk southwards in huge convoys to the burning deserts of northern Syria. Most would die of starvation, murder and disease. In the Ottoman war theatre, Anzacs witnessed the Armenian tragedy—some even helped rescue survivors of the death marches. Many Anzac prisoners captured by the Ottoman Army were held in abandoned Armenian churches and homes and they became key eyewitnesses to the unfolding events.

Every major newspaper in Australia covered the genocide with regularity—the Melbourne Age having published more than 40 articles on the event in 1915 alone. Headings such as ‘Armenians Butchered’, ‘Million Armenians Massacred’ and ‘More Armenians Massacred— girls sold in open market’ were indicative of the tone of the articles being published around this time.[6] By December 1915, the United States consul in Syria reported that some one million Armenians had died and another half-a-million destitute refugees were scattered in or around his consular district. Australian prisoner of war, Private Daniel Creedon of the 9th Battalion AIF, wrote in his diary just two months later: ‘The people say that the Turks killed 11⁄4 million Armenians.’ Creedon was held captive in an isolated internment camp in the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia and died a few months after he made his diary entry. His figure was close to the figure accepted for the death toll of the massacres and suggests that the magnitude of the outrage was known and discussed by the Anzac prisoners of war.
The story of Armenian suffering evoked a strong humanitarian response in Australia at the time leading to the establishment of the Armenian Relief Fund, which began in Victoria in 1915, spread throughout the country, and continued its work for over a decade. The Victorian state war council recognised the Armenian fund as a ‘patriotic fund’ – one considered as having been formed for the purpose of supporting Australia’s allies as well as its own soldiers. The relief movement culminated in the establishment of an Australian-run orphanage for some 1700 Armenian orphans in Beirut, Lebanon.

When the war ended, the victorious Allies arrested over a hundred Turkish officials for their role in the ‘Armenian massacres’ and the ‘ill-treatment’ of Allied (including Anzac) prisoners of war. However, the subsequent rise of a new Turkish nationalist movement headed by Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) succeeded in revoking the post-war Treaty of Sevres which had stipulated an international trial of the Turkish offenders. When the new Turkish republic was

established in 1923, the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire had become a mostly homogenous Turkish nation state.

By the mid-1930s, the Armenian genocide had largely faded from the world’s collective memory. It was an observation not missed by Adolph Hitler when he made his infamous remark in 1939: ‘Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost 49 members of his family during the Holocaust, coined the word ‘genocide’ in 1944. Lemkin cited the Armenian case as a defining example of what the word meant. International jurist Geoffrey Robertson calls the event an ‘inconvenient genocide’ because recognising and remembering the crime in many countries often results in harsh diplomatic reactions from Turkey. In the case of Australia, the Turkish foreign ministry banned some NSW MPs from visiting commemorations at Gallipoli after having voted in favour of an Armenian genocide resolution in the NSW parliament in 2013.

It was not until 1967, some 50 years after Gallipoli, that Turkey and Australia formally established bilateral relations. Since then, the relationship between the two nations has developed rapidly with frequent high-level visits and expanding bilateral trade and investment.[7] On the issue of the Armenian genocide, the Australian federal government has been faced with a moral dilemma. For decades, the government has maintained a policy of non involvement in ‘this sensitive debate’. However in 2014, for the first time, Australia’s foreign minister, Julia Bishop, expressed her Liberal government’s position on the issue in a letter to the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance organisation. She wrote that the Australian government does ‘not ... recognise these events as “genocide”’ adding further that ‘Australia attaches great importance to its relationship with Turkey, which is underpinned by our shared history at Gallipoli, and by the recent cooperation in the G20’.[8] Diplomatic cables between Ankara and Canberra obtained under Freedom of Information laws revealed that last year the matter arose in a letter from Ms Bishop to her Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu. Ms Bishop wrote that ‘recognising the important interests at stake for both countries, I assure you that there has been no decision to change the long-standing position of successive Australian governments on this issue’.

It seems that our nation’s collective memory of Gallipoli and the government’s position on the Armenian genocide are influenced more by current economic and political relations than a true reflection of the past. If, as some historians have suggested, that telling the honest truth about Australia’s First World War experience is the best way to honour our war dead, than it’s time for a more truthful representation of the ‘other side’ of Gallipoli.

Vicken Babkenian is an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney. He is the author of a number of articles on Australia’s humanitarian response to the Armenian genocide.

[1] Russell Crowe’s movie, The Water Diviner is an example.
[2] See Dr Jennifer Lawless, ‘Gallipoli: A Turkish Perspective’, Teaching History (NSW), March 2015.

[3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-28/friendship-wall-unveiled-at-auburn-for-gallipol- centenary/6270026
[4] http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/01/200849135129326810.html
[5] http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/Greeks-of-Gallipoli-1915.pdf
[6]http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=armenian+massacres&exactPhrase=&anyWord s=&notWords=&requestHandler=&dateFrom=1915-05-01&dateTo=1923-12- 31&sortby=dateAsc
[7] http://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/turkey/Pages/turkey-country-brief.aspx
[8] http://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2014/07/23/australian-fm-armenian-case-not- genocide 

On the Armenian Genocide and speaking the truth.

Bernard-Henry Levy's reasoned article on the recent passing by the French National Assembly of a law penalising denial of the Armenian genocide by the government of Turkey and its agencies from the 1890s through to the early 1920s is a timely reminder of the place of law in defending history.  Denialists in all their forms seek to create a new story using parts of an authentic narrative blended with elements from their own world-views.  In order to legitimate their version of history they must de-legitimise the truth as told by others. 

In short, denialists are liars. 

One of the roles of law is to protect truth - this is why we have courts where opposing sides can tell their stories and where a judgement can be made as to the truthfulness of one over the other.  Evidence, fact, reason and logic all play their part.  Ultimately, what destroys the denialist is their own story.  Under scrutiny, their "story" is exposed as a fabrication of half-truths disguised as facts, as a collection of convenient facts that just as conveniently leave out inconvenient facts. 

We witnessed this in the Deborah Lipstadt case against David Irving, who was named by the presiding judge as an antisemite and a racist.

Levy's article also challenges those who seek to revise history from noble aims without allowing this historical processes to complete their tasks.  I have found this in my own work on Pius XII.  The slow process of examining the data on and about Pius is often hampered by well meaning but misguided and misinformed people who believe they are doing a service by proclaiming to the world the Pius XII is a saint, who saved more Jews than anyone else, who deserves to be named as one of the Righteous by Yad Vashem etc.  Those who disagree are labelled all sorts of things, chief among them being "liberal Catholics who have an agenda against John Paul II and Benedict XVI"!

Levy's article speaks with reason and much common sense.  The comments that follow are interesting for the truth in the adage, "There are none so blind as those who will not see".

Bernard Henry Levy

On the Armenian Genocide:

The Response of a Handful of Historians

Are these people really incapable of comprehending? Or are they just pretending not to understand?


The law whose purpose is to penalize negationist revisionism, voted before Christmas by the French parliament, does not propose to write history in the place of historians. And this for the simple reason that this history has been told and written, well written, for a long time. This we have always known: that, beginning in 1915, the Armenians were the victims of a methodic attempt at annihilation. A wealth of literature has been devoted to the subject, based in particular upon the confessions offered by the Turkish criminals themselves, starting with Hoca Ilyas Sami, almost immediately after the fact. From Yehuda Bauer to Raul Hilberg, from researchers at Yad Vashem to Yves Ternon

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/on-the-armenian-genocide-_b_1181758.html?ref=green

Judeophobia and some reactionary Catholics

Earlier this month I posted comments on Pope Benedict XVI's new book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, where the pope repudiated any and all charges of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus.  There has been near universal praise for Benedict's writing. 

However, it should not come as a surprise that there are some who do not share the view of the pope and mainstream Catholic teaching.  One such group is the Society of St Pius X, a fringe group of disaffected Catholics who believe the Church has been in error since Vatican II. 

Among issues the Society believe point to mainstream Catholicism's departure from the "true faith" are inter-religious dialogue and the Church's relationship with Jews and Judaism.  The article below is from the Society's US website and contains a mish-mash of pseudo-theologies that have been comprehensively rejected by the Catholic Church at Vatican II and in the teaching of the popes since.

It is worth recalling that one of the Society's bishops is Richard Williamson, a known Holocaust denier.  Even though SSPX has distanced itself from Williamson, it is no coincidence that the supercessionist theology taught by the Society would encourage people such as Williamson to indulge in their offensive judeophobias.

The article makes for some rather disturbing reading.

Gesture to the Jews from Benedict ...as Pope or Professor?


Pope Benedict XVI has made a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ in his new book, the second volume of Jesus of Nazareth. This should not be surprising since it follows Nostra Aetate, which initiated a revolution of the Church’s relations with Jews. In this new book, Benedict attempts to explain, biblically

For Benedict, the responsibility of Christ’s death is allocated instead to the “Temple aristocracy” and a few supporters of Barabbas who were responsible. Benedict asks: “How could the whole [Jewish] people have been present at this moment to clamor for Jesus’ death?” He deconstructs the famous phrase of the crowd: “His blood be on us and on our children”, a phrase frequently cited as evidence of the collective guilt that the Jews bore and the curse they carried as a result. Benedict, however, argues that Jesus’ blood “does not cry out for vengeance and punishment, it is not poured out against anyone, it is poured out for many, for all.”

He has visited the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland and Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, in spite of the fact that Jewish groups oppose the beatification process of Pius XII, whom they claim should have done more to prevent the Holocaust.

Finally, Benedict approvingly quotes the Cistercian abbess Hildegard: “The Church must not concern herself with the conversion of the Jews, since she must wait for the time fixed for this by God.” Until God’s plan comes to fruition, Benedict says, the “particular task” of the disciples of Christ is to carry the Faith to the Gentiles, not to the Jews.

Concerning Pope Benedict’s interpretation, the following reflections are offered:

The responsibility of the Jewish people as such for the death of Christ has been the constant teaching of the Magisterium, based on Scripture and the Church Fathers. St. John speaks three times in his Prologue of the rejection of Christ by His own (meaning His own people or nation). Romans XII speaks of the rejection of Israel for the profit of the Gentiles. See also St. Augustine’s Treatise 49 On John, near the end: “The chief priests and the Pharisees took counsel together...’If we let Him alone as He is, all will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.’ Fearing the destruction of temporal things, they took no thought of eternal life, and so they lost both. After the Lord’s Passion and glorification the Romans did indeed take away both their place and their nation, by assault on the city and dispersal of the people.” The Fathers connected the punishment of the loss of the nation to the crime of deicide, perpetrated by the highest ranking political and moral authority: the Sanhedrin.

It is important to distinguish today between the Jewish race (which has little to do with Christ’s crucifixion), present day Israel (including the Zionists who were forced to emigrated mostly from Russia), and the Jewish religion (led by rabbis, the doctrinal successors of the Sanhedrin which rejected Christ).

As the Messiah was the whole purpose of Israel, His acceptance by many Gentiles turned them into the true Israel (according to St. Paul) and, similarly, His rejection by many Jews could not but be their undoing, since “God is not mocked.”

Such theological interpretations, based on Romans XII, or the Jewish responsibility for Christ’s death have certainly not been the justification for any alleged Jewish persecution by the Church in the Middle Ages. Witness the sermons of St. Bernard, forbidding the killing of Jews; if there was any pressure from the side of the Church, it was not against them but on their behalf.

Regarding the idea of dialogue vs. conversion, the late Cardinal Dulles provided a blunt assessment about ten years ago: the Church cannot curtail the scope of the Gospel without betraying Herself.

John Vennari (editor of Catholic Family News) recounts hearing a Jewish rabbi (note 1) say that the Gospel account of the Passion is not accurate: that the Pharisees were not hostile to Our Lord, but that they were trying to warn Christ against Pilate’s treachery. Mr. Vennari also reports that this rabbi from the Anti-Defamation League works in union with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops which allows him to teach these falsehoods to Catholics everywhere through the United States.

Footnote


1)  John Vennari said the Rabbi’s name was Rabbi Leon Klenicki, who died in 2009. In 2007, Pope Benedict named Rabbi Klenicki a Papal Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great.