A Government Report to Remove the Catholicos
A government-funded think tank published a roadmap to remove the Catholicos.
Hovik details one of the episode’s most consequential developments: a report of more than 70 pages, published in at least two languages, by the Information and Public Relations Center, a body funded directly by the Prime Minister’s office. The report characterizes the state of the Armenian Apostolic Church as a crisis and includes a recommendation to remove the Catholicos and send him to retirement, along with a roadmap for how to do it.
What makes the clip land is the detail and the tone. Hovik describes the document as Pashinyan’s own hate speech about the Church compressed into report form, and notes that its first section concerns alleged violations of the Catholicos’s vow of celibacy, an extraordinary headline for a government report. He adds that despite its tabloid sourcing, unnamed sources, social-media posts and tabloid links, the report is unusually polished, with an English version written almost as if by a native speaker, suggesting significant and possibly external effort went into it.
The moment anchors the episode’s broader examination of the state campaign against the Armenian Church and the Catholicos of All Armenians. The hosts frame it as the most extreme form of state intervention against the Church by a government that calls itself democratic, and they warn of an all-out campaign in the months ahead, possibly including parliamentary hearings. International figures, including a British MP at PACE and the head of Christian Solidarity International, have since rejected the report and called the campaign an attack on religious autonomy. For an audience following the Armenian Apostolic Church and Civil Contract’s agenda, this clip states the stakes directly.
Transcript
Hovik Manucharyan: published a report more than 70 pages in two languages at least about the church, the state of the church, characterizing it as a crisis. If you read it, basically, if you take all of Pashinyan's speeches and hate speech and drivel about the Armenian church and try to compress it into a report, this is that report. the report, I guess, had a recommendation to remove the catholicos to send them to retirement. And it included a roadmap of how to do it. This is a very concerning issue, of course. We're talking about it in I think sarcasm because, I don't know, it is the most extreme form of intervention against the church by a government that claims to be democratic and is cheered for being so by everyone in the world, like the European is the Western world. read through some of the reports. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but it just basically, even if you read the links, it's linking to tabloid newspapers and websites and even social media posts. And then it's also citing people, sources that it won't name. And it's the same drivel. The first part of the report is about the violation of his vow to celibacy.