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Vatican Cardinal Declares Armenian Genocide 'Stain'on All Humanity
Vatican Cardinal Leonardo Sandri said Saturday that the truth about the Armenian genocide “forces us to come to terms with the question of evil in human history, but above all within our personal history.”
Cardinal Leonardo said the genocide, is a “stain in the history of the whole of humanity, not only of those who were the negative protagonists of those days or of those who have remained silent for indifference or complicity.”
Cardinal Leonardo Sandri was speaking in a homily during a Divine Liturgy of Armenian Catholic Church in Rome on April 24.
Between 1915-1923, around 1.5million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire.
In his homily, Sandri said “the Great Evil Crime,” “forces us to come to terms with the question of evil in human history, but above all within our personal history, when we give in to the compromises of temptation, when we stop listening to the Word of God, when we are indifferent to our brothers or worse, we try to do evil toward them instead of multiplying the blessings and the good towards them.”
“The Great Evil challenges our little daily evils, because the great negative events are always preceded by a prehistory of progressive anesthetization of the conscience,” he stated.
The cardinal said that the relatives of the victims are growing strong in the faith and continue to proclaim and celebrate it today.
“Just as the Jewish people in the Holocaust of a few decades later was crossed by the stabbing question ‘Where was God in the extermination camps,' so too we could ask ourselves the same in the face of the systematically planned suffering of the Armenian people,” Sandri said.
“However, before each path of response, we are called to add another question, which is valid then as today: ‘where is the human being? Where are you a human being, where is your heart, created for good but so capable of harboring feelings of hatred to the point of wanting to exterminate your brothers and actually doing it?’”
Cardinal Sandri said that we know that those who died in Armenian genocide are “friends of God.”
“The life of our brothers and sisters was like that of Jesus, a grain of wheat fallen to the ground that by dying gave life to the whole world by saving it: their fruit remains, and it is we who in the world celebrate this day in faith,” he said.
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