Monday, July 11, 2011

Vatican reveals unpublished Armenian genocide documents from its secret Archives

In the Secret Vatican Archives are stored documents that testify to the unprecedented and shocking genocide by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians after the First World War, documents that will be published soon in a book co-edited by the same Vatican Archives.

The advanced news arrived, a little by surprise, during the presentation in the Vatican of the exhibit "Lux Arcana", which - from next February - will open to the public, for the first time, the treasures of one of the oldest and most extensive archives in the world.

The testimonials, explained the prefect of the Secret Archives, Monsignor Sergio Pagano, describe "in detail" the "procedures of torture that the Turks used towards the Armenians". For example, he said, there is evidence of how the soldiers of the Sublime Porte would bet "on the sex of fetuses in the wombs of pregnant women before they quartered them and with the same knife killed the babies".

These episodes, said the Vatican archivist, who "make me ashamed to be a man, and if it were not for faith, I would see only darkness".

It is easy to imagine that the publication of these documents reignite the tension between the Holy See and Turkey, at a time when the memory of the killing of Monsignor Luigi Padovese, Apostolic Vicar of Anatolia, a year ago June 3rd, is still alive.
Read the rest here.

2 comments:

The Archer of the Forest said...

Oh my lord, that's horrible.

Anonymous said...

Increased tension or not, it is time for these documented atrocities to be put before the public by the Vatican. Let the world see the incontrovertible evidence of these horrors, and take note of what happens under such governments as the Ottomans and their successors -- if only it included evidence of what was done to the Greeks of Asia Minor in the 1920's and of Constantinople in the 1950's by the racist, "secular" Turkish Government.

Think long and hard, Europe, before you admit them to your Union... not because you don't have your own history of evil, but because for the Turks it isn't really "history," it is an un-repented present reality. Just ask the Ecumenical Patriarch.