Pashinian has made a point of attending Sunday liturgies for the last six weeks as part of his controversial attempts to depose the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. All five parish priests that presided over those services deliberately failed to mention to Garegin in their public prayers, breaching a centuries-old rule. Two of them have been defrocked by the church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin as a result.
The three others are expected to receive the same punishment. They serve in dioceses whose primates joined seven other bishops and archbishops in effectively siding with Pashinian and calling for Garegin’s resignation last week. The Catholicos dismissed the call, with the Mother See saying that the senior clerics have been either coopted or forced into submission by Pashinian.
News reports said on Tuesday that Pashinian is planning to go to Gyumri’s Church of Saint Jacob of Nisibis this Sunday for a similar mass which he hopes will be led by one of its priests, Father Ruben Manukian. The latter said that local Pashinian loyalists and NSS officials have already approached him for that purpose, asking him to avoid any reference to Garegin.
“I said that is impossible,” Manukian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “I have uttered His Holliness’s name during liturgies for 25 years and I will continue to do so.”
“We respect you, and you should respect us,” he said, appealing to Pashinian.
Manukian did not name the NSS officials who he claimed tried to pressure him. His claim could give more ammunition to Pashinian’s critics accusing him of violating the church’s separation from the state guaranteed by the Armenian constitution.
Armenia - Masked officers of the National Security Service are confronted by angry followers of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Echmiadzin, June 27, 2025.
The premier already caused uproar in June when he said that daily intelligence briefings presented to him by the NSS contain sensitive details of clerics’ private lives. The NSS is the former Armenian branch of the Soviet KGB notorious for persecuting many priests in the 1920s and 1930s.
Manukian also angrily denied rumors that of all 24 clerics serving in Gyumri and the surrounding Shirak province only he is ready to revolt against Garegin. The head of the Shirak Diocese of the Armenian Church, Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian, is a vocal critic of Pashinian who was arrested in June and subsequently sentenced to two years in prison on charges of calling for a violent regime change denied by him.
Another outspoken archbishop, Bagrat Galstanian, has also been held in prison for more than five months. Galstanian and his 17 supporters are standing trial on what they call trumped-up coup charges.
The two archbishops reaffirmed their allegiance to Garegin and branded their pro-Pashinian colleagues as traitors in a joint statement issued at the weekend.