Armenian Apostolic Church Beliefs

1. Who the Armenian Apostolic Church Is

The Armenian Apostolic Church is the church of the Armenian people, self-governing, episcopal, and holding the faith of the first three ecumenical councils. Its full self-designation is the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Holy Church, and English speakers often shorten this to the Armenian Orthodox Church or the Armenian Church. It belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family, the six apostolic churches that did not receive the Council of Chalcedon of 451, and it is not in communion with the Catholic Church or with the Eastern Orthodox.

The word apostolic in the name is a historical claim. Armenian tradition holds that the gospel reached Armenia through the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew in the first century, and the two are honoured as the first illuminators of the nation. The Mother See at Holy Etchmiadzin still calls itself the see of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, whose fourth-century mission gave the church its organised form. The church has never been a missionary body seeking converts from other nations. It has been the church of one people, at home and scattered, for seventeen centuries.

A Church Without a Country for Most of Its History

Armenia lost independent statehood repeatedly, and the church carried the identity of the nation through Persian, Byzantine, Arab, Seljuk, Mongol, Ottoman, Persian and Soviet rule. That fact shapes almost everything about the Armenian Church. Its catholicoses have functioned as heads of a people as well as bishops of a church. Its manuscript tradition, its cross-stones, its hymnody and its language were the institutions of a nation that often had no other. When Armenians speak of the church as the spine of the nation, they are describing an arrangement that history forced on them and that they made their own.

2. How Armenia Became a Christian Nation

Armenia adopted Christianity as the religion of the kingdom under King Trdat III, converted by Gregory the Illuminator, in an act traditionally dated to the year 301. That makes the Armenian conversion the earliest state adoption of Christianity on record, ahead of the Edict of Milan of 313 and the later establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Armenians treat the date as the foundation of both the church and the nation, and the seventeen hundredth anniversary was kept in 2001.

The date 301 is the traditional Armenian reckoning. Some historians prefer 314, on the grounds that the conversion is more easily placed after the Edict of Milan removed the danger of Roman reprisal. The claim that Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity officially is the account given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Armenia and in the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin's own history of the church. Scholars dispute the year rather than the priority.

Gregory the Illuminator and King Trdat

The traditional account, told fullest in the fifth-century history attributed to Agathangelos, runs like this. Gregory, son of a Parthian noble implicated in the murder of the previous king, was raised Christian in Caesarea of Cappadocia and returned to Armenia in royal service. Trdat, learning who he was and finding him a Christian, had him imprisoned in the pit at Khor Virap for years. A group of Christian women fleeing Roman persecution, led by Hripsime and Gayane, reached Armenia and were killed on the king's order when Hripsime refused him. Trdat fell into a violent madness, Gregory was released at the prompting of the king's sister, and after the king's healing and baptism the kingdom was converted. Gregory was consecrated bishop at Caesarea and became the first Catholicos.

Historians read the narrative as a theological account of a real conversion rather than a chronicle, and the underlying facts stand: an early fourth-century royal conversion, a bishop consecrated at Caesarea, a hereditary catholicosate in Gregory's family for several generations, and the destruction of the older Armenian temples of the Zoroastrian and Hellenistic cults. Etchmiadzin, the Mother See, takes its name from a vision granted to Gregory in which the Only-Begotten descended and struck the earth to mark where the cathedral should stand. Etchmiadzin means the descent of the Only-Begotten.

Hripsime, Gayane and the Armenian Martyrs

The Armenian Church venerates Hripsime, Gayane and their companions as its protomartyrs, and the seventh-century churches built over their traditional burial places at Vagharshapat, Saint Hripsime completed in 618 and Saint Gayane in 630, are among the oldest Armenian churches still standing. Their feast falls in the calendar close to the commemoration of Gregory. For Armenians the sequence matters: the martyrs came first, the conversion followed. The pattern of a church whose credibility rests on those who died in it recurs through Armenian history and returns with terrible force in the twentieth century.

3. The Alphabet, the Bible and the Armenian Fathers

The Armenian alphabet was created around 405 by the monk and scholar Mesrop Mashtots, with the support of Catholicos Sahak Partev and King Vramshapuh, in order to put the Scriptures and the liturgy into Armenian. Before that the Armenian church used Greek and Syriac texts, and worship depended on translators standing beside the reader. The alphabet changed the church and the nation at once, and Mashtots and Sahak are both saints of the Armenian Church with their own feast.

The Queen of Translations

The Armenian Bible produced by Mashtots, Sahak and their students in the fifth century is known in scholarship as the Queen of Translations for the quality of its Greek. It preserves readings of value to textual critics, and it fixed the literary form of Classical Armenian, called grabar, which remains the liturgical language of the church. The same generation, called the Holy Translators, rendered the Greek fathers, the liturgy, and works of history and philosophy into Armenian, and several Greek texts survive only in their Armenian versions. The Armenian Church keeps a Feast of the Holy Translators, which is a national as much as a liturgical commemoration.

On the canon of Scripture, Armenian tradition has been generous and somewhat fluid. Armenian manuscripts commonly include the books Catholics call deuterocanonical, and some also carry texts such as the Letter of the Corinthians to Paul and Third Corinthians, which stand outside the Catholic canon. For the Catholic list and the reasoning behind it, see our guide to the deuterocanonical books.

The Armenian Doctors

Armenian theology has its own line of teachers, less familiar in the West than the Greek and Latin fathers and continuous with them. Eznik of Kolb, in the fifth century, wrote a refutation of Zoroastrian dualism and of Marcion that survives as one of the earliest works of original Armenian prose. Yeghishe wrote the history of the war of Vardan and the Armenian resistance of 451. Movses Khorenatsi composed the classic History of the Armenians. Nerses Shnorhali, catholicos in the twelfth century, wrote hymns still sung every week and corresponded with Byzantium about reunion in terms of striking generosity. Gregory of Narek, treated in section 10, is the one the Catholic Church has now named a Doctor.

4. What Armenians Believe

Armenian belief is the Nicene faith, three ecumenical councils, seven sacraments, the veneration of Mary and the saints, prayer for the dead, and bishops in apostolic succession. A Catholic reading an Armenian catechism will recognise almost all of it. The differences from Catholic teaching are concentrated in three places: the number of councils received, the Roman primacy, and a set of later Latin definitions the Armenian Church has never made.

The Creed and the Councils

The Armenian Church confesses the Nicene Creed, in a form of its own that is close to the received text and adds phrases from the fifth-century Armenian tradition. It accepts as ecumenical the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Council of Constantinople in 381, and the Council of Ephesus in 431, and it holds Cyril of Alexandria as the standard of christological orthodoxy. The councils from Chalcedon in 451 onward it does not receive as ecumenical. The Armenian Creed does not contain the Filioque, the Western addition confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and Armenian theology holds with the rest of the East that the Father is the sole origin within the Trinity. That question is set out at length in our guide to the Filioque.

The Seven Sacraments

The Armenian Church numbers seven sacraments and administers several of them in ways a Latin Catholic will find unfamiliar. Baptism is by a threefold pouring or immersion, followed immediately by chrismation with holy muron and by the reception of Communion, so that Armenian infants are initiated in one service and commune from that day. The muron itself is consecrated by the Catholicos of All Armenians every seven years at Etchmiadzin in a public rite, with each new batch mixed into the remainder of the old, so that the chrism is understood to carry continuity back through the centuries.

Confession in Armenian practice is commonly made in a general form before Communion, with an examination read aloud and absolution given, and private confession to a priest remains available and is used. Marriage includes the crowning of the couple, as in the other Eastern traditions. Ordination follows the ancient threefold pattern of deacon, priest and bishop. Parish priests may be married if they married before ordination, and celibate clergy, who alone are eligible for the episcopate, hold the rank of vardapet, a learned celibate priest with a teaching authority marked by a distinctive staff.

Mary and the Saints

Armenians honour the Virgin Mary as Astvatsatsin, the Bearer of God, the Armenian rendering of Theotokos defined at Ephesus in 431. Her feasts are among the greatest of the year, and the Assumption is kept as the Feast of the Assumption of the Holy Mother of God, one of the five great tabernacle feasts, with the blessing of grapes attached to it in Armenian custom. The Armenian Church venerates the saints, keeps a dense calendar of them, and asks their intercession. It has not defined the Immaculate Conception in the terms Pius IX used in 1854, which is the ordinary Eastern position rather than a slight to Mary.

The Last Things

Armenian teaching holds the resurrection of the dead, the general judgement, heaven and hell, and prays for the departed constantly. Requiem services are offered after every Sunday liturgy and on the days after the great feasts, which are kept as memorial days for the dead. The Armenian Church has not adopted the Latin framework of purgatory as a defined doctrine with a doctrine of satisfaction attached to it, while praying for the dead in the confidence that such prayer helps them. Our guides to purgatory and the final judgment set out the Catholic teaching and the Eastern reserve about it.

5. Armenian Christology in Its Own Terms

Armenian Christology is miaphysite: one incarnate nature of the Word of God, in which the divine and the human are united without confusion, without change, without division and without separation. The formula comes from Cyril of Alexandria, whose authority at the Council of Ephesus in 431 the Armenian Church treats as decisive, and the Armenians read the later Chalcedonian language of two natures as a retreat from Cyril toward the position Ephesus condemned. Both the divinity and the humanity remain whole and complete in the union.

What Miaphysite Means and What It Does Not Mean

The Greek prefix mia means one in the sense of a composite unity, formed from elements that remain what they are. Monos means one in the sense of single and alone. The distinction carries the whole argument. Miaphysite Christology says the incarnate Word is one reality out of two, divinity and humanity, neither of which is diminished. Monophysitism, in the sense the church condemned in the fifth century, is the teaching of Eutyches that Christ's humanity was absorbed into his divinity and is no longer of one substance with ours. The Armenian Church anathematises Eutyches. Calling Armenians monophysite states something about their faith that is false, and Catholic ecumenical documents have stopped doing it.

Armenian formulas make the point directly. Armenian liturgical and confessional texts insist that Christ is consubstantial with the Father in his divinity and consubstantial with us in his humanity, that he suffered truly in the flesh, and that neither nature was destroyed or mixed in the union. The concern behind the one-nature language is that any way of speaking that leaves two subjects standing side by side threatens to make the Incarnation an association rather than a union, and to make the sufferings of Christ the sufferings of a man alongside God rather than of God in the flesh.

The Trisagion in Armenian Use

One liturgical detail carries the Christology visibly. The Armenian Church sings the Trisagion, Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us, addressed to Christ rather than to the Trinity, and adds a clause that changes with the season: who wast crucified for us, or who wast born for us, or who didst rise from the dead. Byzantine Christians read the crucified addition as attributing suffering to the Trinity and rejected it. Armenians answer that since the hymn is addressed to the incarnate Son, the clause states exactly what Ephesus taught, that the one who was crucified is God. The dispute over this single line ran for centuries and is a compact example of how much of the division was about how words were being used.

6. Why Armenia Was Absent from Chalcedon

Armenia sent no bishops to the Council of Chalcedon in 451 because the Armenians were fighting a war for the survival of their faith in that same year. The Sasanian Persian king Yazdegerd II had ordered the Armenians to return to Zoroastrianism, and on 26 May 451 an Armenian force under Vardan Mamikonian met the Persian army at Avarayr. The Armenians lost the battle and Vardan was killed, and the resistance that followed eventually secured the right to remain Christian under the Treaty of Nvarsak in 484. The Armenian Church keeps the feast of Saint Vardan and his companions, Vardanank, as one of its great commemorations.

The consequence for Chalcedon was practical before it was theological. The council met while Armenian bishops were burying their dead, and its acts reached Armenia late, in translation, and mixed together with the works of Nestorius and Theodore of Mopsuestia that Persian-sphere Christians were then circulating. Armenians who first met the two-natures formula met it in that company, and read it as the position Ephesus had condemned in 431. There is a genuine doctrinal judgement here and it was made under conditions that made the judgement almost inevitable.

The Councils of Dvin

The Armenian rejection of Chalcedon was formalised at Dvin. A council there in 506, attended by Armenian, Georgian and Caucasian Albanian bishops, endorsed the Henotikon, the imperial formula of the emperor Zeno that tried to bypass Chalcedon, and affirmed the faith of the three councils. A second council at Dvin, dated 554 or 555 in different accounts, rejected Chalcedon explicitly and set the Armenian Church on the course it has kept since. The Georgian Church later accepted Chalcedon and separated from the Armenians in the early seventh century, which is why Georgia is Eastern Orthodox today and Armenia is not.

Later Attempts at Union

Union between the Armenians and the Chalcedonian churches has been attempted many times. Catholicos Nerses Shnorhali negotiated with Byzantium in the twelfth century and came close to agreement on formulas, and the talks continued after his death in 1173 until they lapsed when the emperor Manuel I died in 1180. In the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, a Latin-facing state during the crusading period, unions with Rome were concluded and repudiated repeatedly, and the Council of Florence issued a bull of union with the Armenians in 1439 which the Armenian Church did not receive. Each of these attempts left a residue: Latin usages in the Armenian rite, a body of polemical literature, and a strong Armenian instinct that union proposals arrive with political conditions attached. That instinct is part of what modern dialogue has had to overcome.

7. Etchmiadzin, Cilicia and the Two Patriarchates

The Armenian Apostolic Church has one faith and four hierarchical sees: two catholicosates and two patriarchates. The Catholicos of All Armenians at Holy Etchmiadzin in Armenia holds the primacy of the whole church. The Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, whose see has been at Antelias in Lebanon since 1930, governs a group of dioceses in the Middle East and the diaspora. The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople are patriarchates with defined territories, under the spiritual primacy of Etchmiadzin.

Why There Are Two Catholicoses

The arrangement is a product of history rather than a doctrinal division. The catholicosate moved with the Armenian people: from Etchmiadzin to Dvin, then to various sees as political power shifted, and in the crusading era to Sis in Cilicia with the Armenian kingdom there. In 1441 an assembly of bishops restored the catholicosate to Etchmiadzin, and the line at Sis continued rather than dissolving, so two catholicoses existed from that point. The Cilician see was displaced from Sis by the events of 1915 and after, and settled at Antelias.

Relations between the two have been strained at times, most sharply during the Cold War, when Etchmiadzin was inside the Soviet Union and Antelias was not, and diaspora communities divided along political lines that ran through parishes. The two sees are in full communion, they share one faith and one liturgy, and Etchmiadzin holds the primacy of honour and the exclusive right to consecrate the holy muron. The division of jurisdictions in the diaspora remains a live pastoral question that Armenians themselves discuss without pretending it is settled.

Jerusalem and Constantinople

The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, based in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City at the Cathedral of Saint James, is one of the three major communities holding rights in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre alongside the Greek Orthodox and the Franciscans of the Latin Custody, with the Copts, Syriacs and Ethiopians holding lesser rights, and it holds rights in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as well. Visitors to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and to the Church of the Nativity encounter Armenian clergy for this reason, and the arrangements governing those churches, known as the Status Quo, rest on Ottoman decrees of 1757 and 1852 and have been kept in force since. The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, at Istanbul, has served the Armenian community of the Ottoman Empire and of Turkey since the fifteenth century.

How the Church Is Governed

The Armenian Church governs itself through a National Ecclesiastical Assembly, which elects the Catholicos and includes lay delegates alongside clergy, and through diocesan assemblies with a similar mixed composition. Lay participation in the election of bishops and of the Catholicos is a settled feature of Armenian church order and it surprises Catholics who expect an Eastern church to be governed by bishops alone. The Supreme Spiritual Council assists the Catholicos in ordinary governance. Karekin II was elected Catholicos of All Armenians in 1999, and Aram I was elected Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia in 1995.

8. The Badarak: Armenian Worship

The Badarak is the Armenian eucharistic liturgy, the centre of Armenian worship, sung in Classical Armenian and usually running about two hours. Its full name is Surb Patarag, the Holy Sacrifice. The Armenian Church uses a single eucharistic liturgy rather than a set of alternatives, and its text draws on Cappadocian and Syrian sources with a distinctive Armenian shape. Choir and congregation sing throughout, and the priest's prayers at the altar run beneath the singing.

Unleavened Bread and Unmixed Wine

Two Armenian usages set the Badarak apart from the Byzantine and Syriac liturgies. The Armenian Church consecrates unleavened bread, as the Latin Church does and unlike the Greek and Syriac traditions which use leavened bread. It also uses unmixed wine, without the water that almost every other rite adds to the chalice. Byzantine polemicists attacked both practices for centuries, and the Armenian defence is that the church received these usages from the beginning and that the wine unmixed signifies the undivided union of divinity and humanity in Christ. The practices carry no difference in what the church believes the Eucharist to be, and the Armenian Church holds the real presence of Christ in the consecrated gifts as Catholics do. Our guide to the Eucharist sets out the Catholic doctrine.

The Curtain, the Chant and the Silence

Armenian churches have no iconostasis. Instead a curtain closes across the raised sanctuary at set moments in the liturgy, most notably during the preparation of the gifts and during Lent, when it stays closed through the whole season and the faithful worship a hidden altar. Armenian chant uses a system of eight modes and a notation, the khaz, whose full reading was lost and partly reconstructed. The traditional Badarak uses no instruments except cymbals and the keshots, ceremonial fans with bells that are shaken at the elevation, though many diaspora parishes have added an organ.

Khachkars and Armenian Church Art

The khachkar, or cross-stone, is the characteristic Armenian devotional object: an upright slab carved with a cross rising from a rosette or sun disc, surrounded by dense interlace, no two alike. They were raised for salvation of souls, in memory of the dead, and to mark victories, foundations and springs. UNESCO inscribed the art of the khachkar on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010. Armenian illuminated manuscripts are a second major body of Christian art, and the Gospel books of the Cilician school, above all those painted by Toros Roslin in the thirteenth century, are its best known part.

The khachkar inscription is on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 2010, under the title Armenian cross-stones art, symbolism and craftsmanship of khachkars.

Armenian Churches and Their Architecture

Armenian church building developed early and independently, with the domed centrally planned church, the drum on squinches, and the conical roof that reads as an Armenian signature. Seventh-century buildings such as Zvartnots, now a ruin, and the churches of Saint Hripsime and Saint Gayane, and later monasteries such as Geghard cut into the rock and the tenth-century foundations at Haghpat and Sanahin, show a tradition working out its own solutions to vaulting and light. For pilgrimage in the wider Christian East, see our overview of Christian pilgrimage sites.

9. The Armenian Calendar and Fasting

The Armenian Church keeps the Nativity and Theophany together on 6 January, and it fasts more than most Western Christians realise. Its calendar is built around five great tabernacle feasts, Nativity and Theophany, Easter, the Transfiguration, the Assumption of the Mother of God, and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, each with a preceding fast and a following memorial day for the dead. Saints' days fall on weekdays, and Sundays belong to the resurrection.

Why 6 January

The Armenian date is the older Christian arrangement rather than a departure from it. The whole church originally kept the birth of Christ, the adoration of the magi and the baptism in the Jordan as one feast of the manifestation of God in the flesh, on 6 January. From the fourth century most churches moved the Nativity to 25 December, and Armenia, outside the Roman Empire and its liturgical currents, did not follow. Armenian Theophany includes the blessing of water, with holy muron poured into it, in memory of the baptism of Christ. The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem follows the Julian calendar, so the same feast falls on 19 January in civil reckoning there, which is why reports place Armenian Christmas in Bethlehem in mid-January.

Fasting in Armenian Practice

Armenian fasting is frequent and dietary. Wednesdays and Fridays are fast days through most of the year. Great Lent runs seven weeks, and three weeks before it opens comes a five-day fast called Arajavorats, the Advance Fast, which is an Armenian peculiarity. There is a fast before Theophany, before the Assumption, before the Exaltation of the Cross, and several shorter fasts through the year, so that the total number of fast days in the Armenian calendar is high. The traditional discipline abstains from all animal products.

Memorial Days and the Dead

The day after each of the five great feasts is a Merelots, a memorial day, when Armenians visit graves and the church offers requiem. That rhythm, joy followed by remembrance of the dead, runs through the Armenian year and shapes how Armenian families use the church. Prayer for the dead is constant in the Badarak itself, and the requiem service after the Sunday liturgy is a fixed part of Armenian parish life.

10. Gregory of Narek, Doctor of the Church

Saint Gregory of Narek was a tenth-century Armenian monk, poet and biblical commentator whose Book of Lamentations is among the most widely read books in Armenian, and Pope Francis declared him a Doctor of the Catholic Church on 12 April 2015. Gregory lived roughly from 951 to 1003 at the monastery of Narek, on the southern shore of Lake Van. He belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church, five centuries after Chalcedon, and was never in visible communion with Rome.

The Book of Lamentations

The Book of Lamentations, known in Armenian simply as the Narek, is a sequence of ninety-five prayers, each headed with the phrase speaking with God from the depths of the heart. Gregory writes in the first person as a sinner who takes on himself the guilt of the whole human race, piling up self-accusation in language of extraordinary intensity, and then turning without transition to the mercy of God as the only ground of hope. Armenians have used it as a book of healing for a thousand years, placing it under the pillows of the sick and reading it aloud to them. Copies were among the possessions families carried out of Anatolia in 1915.

Why the Declaration Matters

Naming Gregory a Doctor of the Church was an ecumenical act as much as a devotional one. A Doctor of the Church is a saint whose writings the Catholic Church commends to the whole body of the faithful as a sure guide, and Gregory belonged to a church that was not in communion with Rome when the title was given to him. The declaration says in practice what the 1996 declaration said in doctrine: the Catholic Church judges that this Armenian monk, formed entirely within a non-Chalcedonian church, taught the faith of Christ. The Catechism of the Catholic Church had already drawn on his work in its treatment of prayer to Mary in the Eastern tradition (CCC 2678). A statue of Gregory of Narek was placed in the Vatican Gardens and blessed by Pope Francis in 2018. Our guide to the saints explains what the Church means when it canonises and when it names a Doctor.

11. What Rome Agreed in 1996

On 13 December 1996 Pope John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin I of All Armenians signed a common declaration in Rome professing one faith in the mystery of the Word incarnate. The text confesses Christ as true God and true man, in whom divinity and humanity are united in one person without confusion, without change, without division and without separation, and it states that the christological controversies between the two churches arose largely from the different meanings attached to the terms that were used and from the political circumstances of the fifth and sixth centuries.

What the Declaration Settled

The declaration settled the christological question that had stood between Rome and Etchmiadzin since Chalcedon. It removed the charge of heresy in both directions on the person of Christ, and it named the historical and linguistic causes of the split rather than assigning fault to one side. It also committed the two churches to cooperation in pastoral matters, in charity, and in the formation of clergy, and it expressed the intention of continuing theological dialogue.

The Armenian declaration follows the pattern of earlier agreements with other Oriental Orthodox churches, with Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church in 1973 and with Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas of the Syriac Orthodox Church in 1984. The 1996 text belongs to a longer arc of contact between Rome and the Armenians in the modern period: Catholicos Vasken I visited Paul VI in Rome in 1970, John Paul II travelled to Armenia in September 2001 for the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Armenian conversion, and a relic of Saint Gregory the Illuminator long kept in Naples was given to the Armenian Church around that anniversary for the new cathedral in Yerevan.

What the Declaration Did Not Settle

Communion was not restored, and the declaration did not claim it had been. Four things remain open. The status of the Council of Chalcedon and the councils that followed it, which Catholics hold as ecumenical and Armenians do not receive, is unresolved. The saints anathematised on each side in the fifth and sixth centuries are a related difficulty, since the Armenian Church honours figures the Chalcedonian churches condemned. The Roman primacy, and the papal jurisdiction and infallibility defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870, are not addressed by a christological agreement at all. Later Latin definitions, the Immaculate Conception of 1854 and the Assumption defined in 1950, stand outside anything the Armenian Church has taught in that form.

Sacramental Sharing

Catholic law makes provision for sacramental sharing with the Oriental Orthodox in particular circumstances. Canon 844 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law permits Catholic ministers to administer the Eucharist, penance and anointing of the sick to members of Eastern churches not in full communion with Rome who ask for them of their own accord and are properly disposed, and it permits Catholics who cannot approach a Catholic minister to receive these sacraments from ministers of those churches where their sacraments are valid. Whether an Armenian priest will admit a Catholic to Communion is a matter for the Armenian Church, and the answer varies. Ask the parish rather than presenting yourself on the strength of a canon in another church's law book.

12. Armenian Orthodox and Catholic Compared

Armenian Apostolic and Catholic Christians share far more than they differ on, and the differences are concentrated in councils, primacy and a handful of later definitions. The table below sets the two side by side on the questions people actually search for. Each row states the Armenian position as the Armenian Church states it, then the Catholic position.

The Catholic column follows the Second Vatican Council decree Unitatis Redintegratio 14 to 18, the 1983 Code of Canon Law canon 844, the 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism, and the 1996 common declaration. The Armenian column describes the teaching and general practice of the Armenian Apostolic Church; particular questions of discipline are decided by the dioceses and the sees, so ask locally.

What the Two Churches Hold in Common

The list of agreements is longer than the list of differences and it is worth stating plainly. Both churches confess the Trinity and the Incarnation, hold bishops in apostolic succession, celebrate seven sacraments, believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, venerate the Virgin Mary as Mother of God, ask the intercession of the saints, honour relics and images, pray for the dead, keep monasticism, read Scripture within the church's tradition, and hold the same moral teaching on the great questions of life and marriage. Neither church accepts the sixteenth-century Protestant principle that Scripture alone is the rule of faith. On the question of Scripture and Sacred Tradition, Rome and Etchmiadzin stand on the same side.

13. The Armenian Catholic Church Is a Different Body

The Armenian Catholic Church is an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with Rome that keeps the Armenian liturgy, calendar and canon law. It is a separate church from the Armenian Apostolic Church, with its own bishops, its own patriarch and its own faithful, and confusing the two is a common error. Its head is the Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians, whose see is in Lebanon, with the patriarchal convent at Bzoummar and the patriarchal residence in Beirut.

How It Came to Exist

Catholic missionary activity among Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Persia from the seventeenth century produced communities that entered communion with Rome, and the church took formal shape in 1742 when Abraham Ardzivian, an Armenian bishop already in communion with Rome, was recognised as patriarch by Benedict XIV. Armenian Apostolic Christians have generally experienced this history as division rather than reunion, and the objection has a name in ecumenical documents. The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church agreed at Balamand in 1993 that uniatism is not an acceptable method for seeking unity, while affirming that the Eastern Catholic churches which already exist have a right to exist and to serve their faithful. Both halves of that statement stand.

The Armenian Catholic Church suffered severely in 1915 alongside the Apostolic Church, and it lost bishops and priests in the deportations. It maintains parishes across the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Armenia, and the Mekhitarist congregation of Armenian Catholic monks, founded on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice and long established in Vienna, has preserved and published a great deal of Armenian literature. For the wider family, see our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches.

14. 1915 and the Memory the Church Carries

The destruction of the Ottoman Armenian population beginning in 1915 is the central event of modern Armenian history, and the Armenian Apostolic Church lost dioceses, monasteries, clergy and the greater part of its ancestral territory in it. Armenians commemorate the victims on 24 April, and on 23 April 2015 the Armenian Apostolic Church canonised them collectively as martyrs in a rite at Etchmiadzin. The church's structures in the diaspora, including the presence of the Cilician catholicosate in Lebanon, are largely the shape that survival took.

What the Popes Have Said

The common declaration signed by John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin II at Holy Etchmiadzin on 27 September 2001 speaks of the extermination of a million and a half Armenian Christians in "what is generally referred to as the first genocide of the twentieth century". Pope Francis repeated that description at a Mass in Saint Peter's Basilica on 12 April 2015, marking the centenary, in the presence of Armenian church leaders and the President of Armenia, and he visited Armenia in June 2016. Turkey rejects the genocide characterisation. This page reports what the Holy See and the Armenian Church have said and does not conduct the historical argument, which belongs elsewhere.

The quoted phrase is from the common declaration of Pope John Paul II and Catholicos Karekin II, signed at Holy Etchmiadzin on 27 September 2001, and was repeated by Pope Francis at Saint Peter's Basilica on 12 April 2015. Both texts are published on the Holy See website.

Why This Belongs in a Doctrinal Guide

Armenian Christianity cannot be described accurately without it. The Narek read to the dying, the memorial days after every great feast, the emphasis on martyrdom running from Hripsime to Vardan to 1915, and the diaspora structure of the church are all connected. A Catholic who wants to speak with Armenian Christians about doctrine should know that the doctrinal conversation sits inside a history of survival, and that the church is holding a nation together as well as teaching the faith. Our guide to suffering and the Christian answer to it takes up the theological question directly.

15. Four Names That Get Confused

Four different bodies carry names that sound alike, and mixing them up produces errors of fact. The Armenian Apostolic Church is Oriental Orthodox. The Eastern Orthodox Church is a separate communion. The Eastern Catholic churches, including the Armenian Catholic Church, are in communion with Rome. The Latin Church is the Western Catholic church most readers already know.

The Armenian Apostolic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church are not in communion with one another, and the Armenian Church is not a branch of it. Dialogue between the Oriental Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox produced agreed statements on Christology in 1989 and 1990 without restoring communion between them either. Our guides to the Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church cover the Eastern Orthodox side, and our guide to Christian denominations maps the whole landscape.

16. What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Speak about the Armenian Church accurately, which begins with using the right words for it. Call it Oriental Orthodox, never monophysite, and never Eastern Orthodox. Know that it accepts three councils and why. Know that Rome and Etchmiadzin have jointly professed one faith in Christ since 1996 and that this is a real agreement, and know equally that communion has not been restored and that saying otherwise helps nobody.

Practical Steps

Attend a Badarak if there is an Armenian parish near you, stand through it, and do not present yourself for Communion unless you have been invited by the priest. Read Gregory of Narek, whose Book of Lamentations is available in English translation and whom the Catholic Church now commends to you as a Doctor. Pray for Christian unity, which Christ asked for himself in John 17:21, and pray for the Christians of the Middle East, among whom Armenians have been present since before any of the modern borders existed. If you visit Jerusalem, walk the Armenian Quarter and understand whose it is.

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