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Taking a leaf from the Armenians' book

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  • Taking a leaf from the Armenians' book

    Taking a leaf from the Armenians' book


    Sacred Mysteries: the ancient civilisation of Armenia remains exotic
    and unknown in the West, but a holy monk from lake Van has just been
    declared a Doctor of the Church

    St Gregory of Narek: "This book will cry out in my place."
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    By Christopher Howse
    7:00AM GMT 28 Feb 2015


    There's a little book on my shelf that I can't read. It is in
    Armenian, and I cannot even make out the attractive curly alphabet.
    Byron, by all accounts, did rather better, taking lessons in the
    language, from 1816, at the monastery where my book was printed.

    This is at San Lazzaro, an island in Venice, between San Giorgio and
    the Lido. It was granted to the Armenian monks in 1717. The little
    community was brought there in that year by their first abbot Mechitar
    of Sebaste, after whom the monks are called Mechitarists.

    This monastery was of Armenian Catholics, in other words, Armenians
    who recognised the primacy of the Pope. The majority of Armenians
    belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Armenians are fond of telling
    you that theirs was the first country to adopt Christianity, in 301,
    thanks to St Gregory the Illuminator. Armenia, with its Indo-European
    language unrecognisably related to ours, has a proud civilisation, but
    to say that its history in recent centuries has been difficult is an
    understatement.

    I was thinking about the Armenians because, in the bright winter sun
    on Tuesday, I stumbled across the Armenian church in Kensington, St
    Sarkis, its white Portland stone shining exotically amid the red-brick
    mansion flats around it. It was built in 1922 in memory of the
    philanthropist Calouste Gulbenkian's parents.

    The Prince of Wales visited the Armenians in London a few weeks ago at
    their nearby church of St Yeghiche as part of his efforts to draw
    attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East. He mentioned
    the destruction last November (by Islamists of the al-Nusra Front) of
    the Armenian church at Deir ez-Zor in Syria. It had been built as a
    memorial to the thousands of Armenian refugees from Turkey who died
    there in the second decade of the 20th century.

    With these thoughts in mind, I discovered that Pope Francis had last
    Saturday named a great Armenian saint, Gregory of Narek (pictured
    above), as a Doctor of the Church. That is a rare title, there having
    been only another 35 in the history of the Church - people like St
    Jerome or St Athanasius.

    St Gregory (950-1003) lived as a monk at Narek, near lake Van in what
    is now Turkey. A little more than 1,000 years later, the great
    monastery with its conical domes in the Armenian style was destroyed
    and the Armenians living around it killed.

    St Gregory of Narek's best-known work, the Book of Prayer, also called
    the Lamentations, might have been written as a meditation on that
    disaster and the episodess of martyrdom that have punctuated Armenia's
    history. The saint's aim is to bring God's mercy to bear on mankind so
    that it might share in God's nature. "This book will cry out in my
    place, with my voice, as if it were me," he wrote. "May unspeakable
    faults be confronted and the traces of evil wrung out."

    Last year Pope Francis met the Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic
    Church, Karekin II, and spoke about martyrdom as a way of reuniting
    the Church. He had sketched out his thoughts before by remarking: "In
    some countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross or having a
    Bible; and before they kill them they do not ask them whether they are
    Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic, or Orthodox."

    In St Gregory of Narek's day, the Armenian Church, having followed its
    own path after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was presumed by the
    Orthodox and by Western Catholics to be monophysite in teaching, with
    false beliefs about the nature of Jesus as God and man. It could
    hardly have been the case in practice, and the Catholic recognition of
    St Gregory and other Armenian saints demonstrated a shared faith. The
    proclamation of him as a doctor sets the seal on that unity of belief.
    In these murderous times, Christians in the East need all the unity of
    spirit they can muster.


    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11441193/Taking-a-leaf-from-the-Armenians-book.html

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