Never forget

IN 1915 Pope Benedict XV wrote to Mehmed V, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire, saying that he could hear “the echo of the groans of an entire people…subjected to unspeakable sufferings”. When the two leaders’ modern-day counterparts met last November at the Turkish presidential palace outside Ankara, those echoes were still audible. According to a new book by Franca Giansoldati, the Vatican-watcher of Il Messaggero, an Italian daily, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, “begged” Pope Francis to refrain from openly characterising the Ottoman empire’s slaughter of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.

The pope respected his host’s wishes then. But on April 12th he abandoned tact and referred to the killings as “the first genocide of the 20th century”. The Turkish government responded with outrage and recalled its ambassador to the Holy See for consultations. A vote in the European Parliament on April 15th, commending the pope’s statement and urging Turkey to recognise the massacres as genocide, further infuriated Mr Erdogan. “It is not possible for Turkey to accept such a crime, such a sin,” he said.

Francis has used the same phrase before, most recently in 2013 when he met an Armenian delegation. But that was scarcely reported, and the Turkish authorities merely expressed “disappointment” and called in the Vatican’s envoy for a ticking-off. This time, he was making a much-awaited speech in front of Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan, days before the official centenary commemorations on April 24th.

Turkish diplomats are understood to have set themselves two aims as the centenary approached: to stop the mass at which Francis spoke being held on the day itself, and to prevent him from using the G-word. They gained their first objective. In deciding to deny them their second, the pope and his diplomatic advisers had to weigh opposing factors.

The Holy See has warmer relations with Turkey than any other Muslim country. Vatican officials recognise that Mr Erdogan has gone further than his predecessors in acknowledging the mass killing of Armenians. Against that is their desperation over Islamist persecution of Christians and what the Vatican views as Muslim clerics’ and politicians’ failure to oppose it. Recent months have seen mass killings of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria, Libya and Kenya. The pope and his advisers believe that a decisive phase has been reached in the eradication of Christianity from Iraq and Syria.

The Vatican has long been the venue of a tug-of-war between proponents of careful dialogue with the Islamic world and advocates of bluntness, who feel that tact has got Christians nowhere and that plain speaking is needed, even if it causes offence. The plain-speakers had the upper hand under the previous pope, Benedict XVI. Francis’s latest comment suggests they are back in the ascendancy.