Pashinian has made a point of attending Sunday masses in five different churches in recent weeks in a bid to step up the pressure on 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 prayers and sermons, breaching the centuries-old rule. Two of them have already been defrocked by the church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin as a result.
Another priest, who serves at a church in Gyumri, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Wednesday that NSS officials “asked” him to also avoid mentioning Garegin during the upcoming mass which Pashinian reportedly plans to attend. Father Ruben Manukian said he refused to do that. He rebuked Pashinian for “getting those priests into trouble.”
Manukian’s remarks caused uproar from opposition figures and other critics of the Armenian government strongly supporting Garegin. They accused the NSS of overstepping its powers and thus demonstrating that Pashinian’s campaign is illegal.
The premier admitted that the NSS, which is the former Armenian branch of the Soviet KGB secret police, is trying to have liturgies he wants to attend censored.
“When I intend to participate [in a mass] we ask that the fact that we believe Ktrich Nersisyan (Garegin’s original name) is not a Catholicos be taken into account,” he told reporters. “In one case, that could be [done through] an acquaintance, an NSS employee, a friend, my assistant … It depends on who knows whom, who is connected with whom.”
Pashinian claimed that the NSS is legally empowered to influence the content of church services and even vet worshippers attending them.
“The moment I go to a church for a service, that place becomes subject to state protection, and activities are carried out there, including security activities in the church, and analyses are done to ensure the safety of people's approaches, their views and their extreme or non-extreme views,” he said.
Asked just how uttering the Catholicos’s name in a church might endanger him, Pashinian said Garegin poses a “threat to Armenia’s state security.”
Pashinian sparked similar opposition accusations of abuse of power in June when he said that daily intelligence briefings presented to him by the NSS contain sensitive details of clerics’ private lives. He said his allegations that Garegin and other senior clergymen have had secret sex affairs in breach of their vows of celibacy are based on that information.
In early November, a presumably government-linked account on the Telegram social media platform circulated a sexually explicit video purportedly featuring Archbishop Arshak Khachatrian, the outspoken head of the church’s Mother See Chancellery. Khachatrian dismissed the video as fake.
Nevertheless, ten other bishops and archbishops seized upon it last week to accuse Garegin of covering up the sex scandal and demand his resignation. The Catholicos dismissed the call, with the Mother See saying that the senior clerics have been either coopted or forced into submission by Pashinian.
On Wednesday, 27 other bishops and archbishops issued a joint statement denouncing the government-backed revolt and reaffirming their allegiance to Garegin. Three of them are currently held in jail on charges rejected by them as politically motivated.