Behind the bitter personal rift between Armenia’s Prime Minister and the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church lies the long and complex history of a small and resourceful nation which has suffered trauma and adversity
Canon Natalie Watson in The Tablet August 1 2026
Armenia is a small, landlocked state with a population of three million. There is a diaspora of approximately seven million, with large communities in the US, France, the Middle East and Russia……
While Armenia has a secular constitution, with a strict separation of Church and state, the constitution recognises “the exclusive mission of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church, as a national church, in the spiritual life of the Armenian people, in the development of their national culture and preservation of their national identity”.
Armenia is the oldest Christian country in the world. In 301, before the Roman Empire, it adopted Christianity as its official state religion. St Gregory the Illuminator baptised the king and became the first Catholicos. The Church is one of the pillars of Armenian identity and nationhood……
More than 90 per cent of the population in Armenia and most of the diaspora describe themselves as members of the Church. This shared identity has held the nation together and helped sustain it through the dark times of the genocide and decades of anti-Armenian pogroms, massacres and religio-ethnic cleansing before and after 1915…….
After Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war against Azerbaijan, there were calls from various factions for the Prime Minister to step down. Catholicos Karekin II [Catholicos since 1999] joined in. Since then, the government’s relationship with the Church has sharply deteriorated..…
Last year, security forces detained more than a dozen clergymen, including Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, who in 2024 led street protests in an attempt to force Pashinyan to resign. I was told by sources inside the Church that clergy and lay people frequently suffer intimidation, arbitrary arrests, prolonged pre-trial detention, travel bans and the weaponisation of criminal justice.
The rift between Prime Minister Pashinyan and Karekin II has turned into a public vendetta, with Pashinyan accusing the Catholicos not only of being a threat to national security and an agent of “foreign powers” but also of having broken his vow of celibacy and having a daughter. There are claims that senior clergy maintain historical and symbolic ties with the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state; the Church points out that bishops and clergy of the Apostolic Church working in Russia, among them Karekin’s brother, serve the two million members of the Armenian diaspora in Russia and have no canonical ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. …….
In a letter to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Samvei Karapetyan, a benefactor of the Armenian Church, warned that the EU’s unconditional support of Pashinyan has in effect meant the dismantling of democracy in Armenia by ignoring mass arrests, electoral fraud and the government’s campaign against the Armenian Apostolic Church…….
For many Armenians, something existential is at stake here: the survival of the nation itself. They see the Apostolic Church as the voice of Armenia’s conscience, the defender of its rights and dignity. It represents Armenia’s identity as a Christian nation, and holds the memory of the traumatic events that are a crucial part of that nationhood and identity – the genocide and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. It does so not only for Armenians living in the country but also for the members of the diaspora who trace the displacement and relocation of their families to the genocide but regard Armenia as their spiritual home……..
The Church has a special place in the national consciousness and [Prime Minister] Pashinyan might be missing an opportunity to find common ground with a strong and wise ally to protect Armenia’s interests. And if Pashinyan is to have credibility as the leader of an emerging democratic and western-orientated Armenia, he should hesitate before attacking the Church’s integrity or trying to interfere in its internal affairs.