YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Catholicos Karekin II’s New Year’s Eve address to the nation will not be made available to Armenian Public Television because the government-controlled broadcaster has again refused to air it right before Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s message, the Armenian Apostolic Church said on Thursday.
The annual addresses by Karekin and his two predecessors, followed by similar speeches delivered by the incumbent president or prime minister of the republic, had been aired shortly before midnight on December 31 ever since 1990. Public Television broke with this post-Soviet tradition on December 31, 2023 amid Pashinian’s heightened tensions with the supreme head of the church. The church’s Echmiadzin-based Mother See rejected its last-minute offer to air the pontifical message during an earlier news program.
The press office of the Mother See said the television management decided to schedule the message for 9:55 p.m. local time without consulting with it.
“The television company continues to bypass the decades-old tradition of broadcasting the New Year’s message of the Catholicos of All Armenians, ignoring the position of the Mother See and the demands and expectations of the Armenian Church faithful in Armenia and around the world,” it said in a statement.
In these circumstances, it said, the Mother See “does not consider it appropriate to broadcast the message on Public Television.” It will be aired by other broadcasters “at the time set by tradition in previous years,” added the statement.
Contacted by RFE/RL’s Armenian Service, the TV channel run by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s loyalists argued that in the absence of any legal requirements Armenian broadcasters are free to decide the time and sequence of New Year addresses. But it did not say why it decided not to stick to the tradition and whether that is connected with tensions between the government and the church.
The channel’s December 2023 move drew strong condemnation from many opposition and public figures. They claimed that it was ordered by Pashinyan.
Pashinyan’s relationship with the ancient church, to which the vast majority of Armenians belong, has increasingly deteriorated in recent years and especially since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Karekin II and other senior clergymen joined the Armenian opposition in calling for Pashinyan’s resignation following Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war. The premier has accused them of meddling in politics.
One of the clergymen, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, led anti-government protests in May and June this year sparked by Pashinyan’s controversial territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. The church’s Supreme Spiritual Council voiced support for Galstanyan and his supporters on May 7 as they marched from the northern Tavush province to Yerevan to demand Pashinyan’s resignation. Pashinyan denounced the church and threatened to impose new taxes on it.
Later in May, police tried to physically stop Karekin II from visiting the Sardarapat war memorial just before a delayed Pashinyan-led ceremony was held there to mark a key national holiday. The Catholicos and other clerics accompanying him had to break through police cordons to lay flowers there.
Despite the unprecedented tensions, Pashiyian and members of his political team accepted Karekin’s invitation to attend on September 29 a Mass held at the newly renovated Mother Cathedral of Echmiadzin. The church indicated afterwards that Karekin II has not changed his critical attitude towards the country’s political leadership.
