Consecration of Khoren I, Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia (May 12, 1963)

After the premature and unexpected passing of Zareh I, Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia, in February 1963, at the age of forty-eight, it fell to his schoolmate at the Seminary, Archbishop Khoren Paroyan, and the difficult task to steer the ship of the Catholicosate in hard times. The “greeting of Jerusalem” with Catholicos of All Armenians Vazken I, in October would mend the rift that had appeared in the Armenian Church after the election of Zareh I in 1956.

The future Catholicos was born Mesrob Paroyan on November 24, 1914, in Nicosia (Cyprus), from parents from Kharpert. He spent his childhood in the village of Adalia. Returning to Nicosia in 1927, he entered the local Melikian primary school. Upon graduation in 1931, he was admitted to the newly founded Seminary of the Catholicosate of the Holy See of Cilicia in Antelias. He graduated and was ordained deacon in 1935. Two years later, he took the vows of celibacy and was consecrated monk (apegha) with the name Khoren, receiving the rank of archimandrite (vartabed) in 1938.

He occupied different positions in the Catholicosate from 1938-1942: chancellor, staff-bearer, vice dean of the Seminary, and member of the Brotherhood’s Administrative Council. In 1942 the Representative Assembly of the Prelacy of Beria (Aleppo) elected the young vartabed as Vicar in the region of Jazeera (on the borders with Turkey and Iraq), where 35,000 Armenians lived at the time. He organized the ecclesiastic, socio-cultural, and educational life for the next five years, during a turbulent period when Syria was engaged in the struggle for independence from the French mandate. Meanwhile, in 1946 he was elevated to the rank of dzayrakooyn vartabed.

In 1947 he returned to Antelias and Catholicos Karekin I consecrated him bishop. From 1947-1951 he held the two most important positions of the Catholicosate, sacristan and “door’s bishop” (turan yebisgobos), the latter providing all internal administrative matters. The Representative Assembly of the Prelacy of Lebanon elected him Prelate in late 1951. Bishop Khoren Paroyan once again showed his remarkable skills as administrator and builder, renovating and building new churches and schools.

The election of a successor to Karekin I, who died in 1952, had been postponed several times. After the Brotherhood Assembly elected Bishop Paroyan as new Vicar of the Catholicosate in October 1955, his expediency ensured the holding of elections in February 1956. He would become the right arm of newly elected Catholicos Zareh I.

He was elevated to the rank of archbishop in 1956 and visited the United States as Catholicosal Legate between October 1957 and June 1958. During his eight-month sojourn, he visited all Armenian centers in this country, celebrating the Divine Liturgy, preaching, lecturing, and explaining the role and mission of the Catholicosate in the Diaspora. As a result of his tireless organizational work, the Armenian Prelacy of the United States and Canada was born in 1958. After departing from the United States, he also visited the newly admitted prelacies of Greece, Tehran, Ispahan, and Iranian Azerbaijan.

His Holiness Khoren visits the Secretary-General of the United Nations, U Thant, on April 16, 1969, during his extended visit to the United States

After Catholicos Zareh I’s passing, Archbishop Khoren was elected once again Vicar and organized the elections held three months later, with the participation, for the first times, of representatives of the new prelacies of the United States, Greece, and Iran. He was elected Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia and consecrated on May 12, 1963. Catholicos Khoren’s twenty-year tenure was marked by a wide effort to improve and renovate the monastery of Antelias, as well as the seminary in Bikfaya. He also executed the construction of affordable housing for Armenian families in the neighborhood of Fanar and initiated the construction of the Armenian Home for the Aged. He visited the faithful in the different countries, including a four-month visit to the United States and Canada in 1969. He had also met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1967, while elevating the visibility of the Catholicosate both in the relations with the other Armenian denominations and the ecumenical field.

 

Health problems affected Khoren I starting with a heart crisis in 1969 during his American trip. In 1977, after the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of his consecration as celibate priest, Archbishop Karekin Sarkissian, then Prelate of the Eastern Prelacy, was elected Catholicos Coadjutor. He would become Khoren I’s successor after his death on February 9, 1983, opening a new chapter in the history of the Catholicosate.

Birth of Catholicos Sahag II Khabayan (March 25, 1849)

During his more than three decades of tenure, Catholicos Sahag II endured and witnessed the Armenian Genocide and the final catastrophe that deprived the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia of its seat of Sis.
He was born Kapriel Khabayan in the village of Yeghek, in the plain of Kharpert, on March 25, 1849. In 1867, at the age of eighteen, he entered the seminary of the Armenian monastery of St. James and was ordained deacon in 1869. He was sent to Constantinople to further his studies, and returned in 1871, becoming a teacher at the seminary. Patriarch Yesayi ordained him celibate priest on July 3, 1877 with the name Sahag. He later became editor in chief of Sion, the monthly publication of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and head of the printing house. For a time, he was a member of the Board of Directors and chairman of the General Assembly of the congregation.
Very Rev. Sahag Khabayan was sent as legate to the Caucasus in 1881. He worked there as a preacher and collected money. On January 10, 1885, he was elected sacristan of Holy Etchmiadzin and on November 24, Makar I, Catholicos of All Armenians, consecrated him bishop.
The See of Cilicia remained vacant after the death of Catholicos Mgrdich I Kefsezian (1871-1894) in November 1894. The interregnum lasted eight years. Catholicos of All Armenians Mgrdich I (1892-1907), best known as Khrimian Hayrig, favored the candidacy of Bishop Sahag Khabayan. On October 12, 1902, 62 delegates from the fifteen dioceses under the jurisdiction of the Catholicosate elected Catholicos Sahag II by unanimity. The ceremony of consecration was held on April 23, 1903, in the monastery of Sis. He would be the last Catholicos consecrated in Cilician lands.
The relations between Etchmiadzin and Sis grew closer during Sahag II’s years, who established the preferential mention of the name of the Catholicos of All Armenians in the Holy Mass with an encyclical. He worked actively to renovate and improve the monastery, which had fallen into disrepair and inactivity. He reopened the seminary of Sis in 1906.
Years of turmoil and destruction loomed ahead. He first witnessed the massacre of Adana in 1909, and, in the first months of the Armenian Genocide, he was exiled to Aleppo, where he witnessed and reported extensively on the misery of the deportees, and then to Jerusalem. Another exile followed in 1917, this time to Damascus. After the end of World War I, he returned to Cilicia, now put under French mandate, with the survivors in 1919.
A second set of catastrophes unleashed in 1920 with the attacks of the Kemalist forces and the passive stance of the French. After the massacre of Marash in February, Sis was evacuated in June, and Hadjin fell to another massacre after an eight-month heroic resistance in October. Catholicos Sahag went to Paris to defend the cause of Cilicia, but in vain. In 1921 the last Armenian remnants left Cilicia and the Catholicos was the leader of his flock. For the next eight years, the historical See of Cilicia would have a wandering life, from Aleppo to Damascus to Beirut to Cyprus. The pastoral letter written by Sahag II in Damascus on February 28, 1922, was highly eloquent in its opening statement: “Greetings to the Armenians of Cilicia, now emigrated and spread throughout the world, greetings to the suffering from the suffering Shepherd, from Catholicos Sahag II of the once Great and now Ruined House of Cilicia.” The document emphasized:
“Make your voice heard, dear children, where are you? I want to follow the trail of your crucifixion, if not to materially and morally help you, at least to share your grief and lighten your yoke and burden. I wish the yoke and burden belonged to Christ. The yoke put by the world and implacable men is asphyxiating, and their burden is heaviest and bitterest.
“(. . .) This lionhearted people, although famished, naked, and homeless in foreign lands, do not beg. They wait for any moral or material help from their families, who remained free of any calamity, terror, and suffering in free countries, although they cried over the unknown tombs of their dearest ones. You cried and gave abundantly to relieve, make live, and defend the overlooked rights of those left alive.”
In 1929 Sahag II appealed for help to the Near East Relief that managed an orphanage in Antelias, then a suburban area of Beirut. The charitable organization leased the property to the Catholicosate for the symbolic price of a dollar per year. Cilicia was reborn in Antelias. In 1930, due to the advanced age of the Catholicos, Archbishop Papken Guleserian, aged 62, was designated Coadjutor Catholicos as Papken I. He was supposed to succeed Sahag II, then aged 81, but this did not happen. Both Church leaders worked together to strengthen the Catholicosate until the premature death of Coadjutor Catholicos Papken I in 1936.
The Armenian community of Lebanon celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the enthronement of Sahag II on June 18, 1933. President Charles Debbas decorated the Catholicos with the order of the Republic of Lebanon in the first degree.
Sahag II closed a life of continuous service to the Church and his people on October 8, 1939, in Antelias, at the age of 90.

Death of Karekin I Hovsepiants, Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia, June 21, 1952

“Armenian people, believe in your past, in your history, in the God of your fathers, in their immortal and alive soul, and you will not die. Believe that you will live and act with that believe, work and hope... and you will not die.”

These words belong to Karekin Hovsepiants, one of the most remarkable figures of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the twentieth century. A Church leader, he was also a distinguished scholar of Armenian studies and a name of national proportions.

Karekin Hovsepiants (his birth name was also Karekin) was born in the village of Maghavuz (Karabagh) in 1867. He studied in the Kevorkian Seminary of Holy Ecthmiadzin from 1882-1890. He pursued higher studies in Germany (Leipzig, Halle and Berlin) from 1892-1897, and obtained his doctorate in Theology from Leipzig University with a dissertation on the origins of monothelitism, the Christological doctrine about how the divine and human relate in the person of Jesus that formally emerged in Armenia and Syria in the seventh century.

Karekin Hovsepiants returned to the Caucasus and had a flourishing activity. He was ordained a celibate priest in 1897. After three years of intense teaching at the Seminary of Holy Etchmiadzin (1897-1900), which he had to interrupt due to health problems, he was designated Vicar of the Armenian diocese of Tiflis and participated actively in the intellectual life of the Armenian community (1900-1902). He was later the principal of the diocesan school of Yerevan (1902-1905), dean of the Seminary (1905-1907), editor of Ararat, the journal of the Catholicosate (1906-1907), abbot of the monastery of Saint Hripsime (1907-1914), again dean of the Seminary (1914-1917). In the meantime, his research and publication had gained him the respect of the Armenian intelligentsia.

In 1917, Catholicos of All Armenians Kevork V consecrated him as bishop. In May 1918 Hovsepiants participated actively in the crucial battle of Sardarabad and was decorated for his bravery by the government of the newly-founded Republic of Armenia. In 1920, he established a chair of Armenian Art and Archaeology at the newly created Yerevan State University. After the establishment of the Soviet regime, the chair was closed, most probably because the religious content of art ran counter to Soviet ideology.

He continued his ecclesiastic and intellectual activities and in 1927 he was designated Primate of the diocese of Russia, Crimea, and Nor Nakhichevan. In 1932 he became a member of the Supreme Spiritual Council of Holy Etchmiadzin and in 1934 was designated nuncio for the Armenian Diaspora by Catholicos Khoren I. He traveled through different communities and from 1936-1938 he tried unsuccessfully to mend the split in the Armenian Church of America. From 1938-1943 he was Primate of the Armenian Diocese of America.

He was elected Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia in 1943 but due to the difficulties of World War II he was only able to take the position in 1945. The Catholicate had just come out from the very difficult years following its establishment in Antelias in 1929. During his seven-year tenure, Catholicos Karekin I gave a powerful momentum to administrative, ecclesiastic, educational, and publishing activities, and turned the Catholicate into a focus of Armenian life in the Diaspora. He also continued to publish very important works about Armenian history and art. After suffering two heart attacks in 1950, he was confined to bed until his passing on June 21, 1952.

Shortly after his death, a twenty-year-old seminarian, Neshan Sarkissian, was ordained a priest and took the name Karekin in remembrance of the late Catholicos. He would go on to become Catholicos Karekin II of Cilicia and later Karekin I of All Armenians.