Pope Francis Recalls Turkish 'Genocide' of 1.5 Million Armenians, Sparking Row

Pope Francis blesses the missal as he leads a mass on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian mass killings, in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on April 12, 2015.Pope Francis sparked a diplomatic row on Sunday when he publicly called the 1915Turkish massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians as "the first genocide of the 20th century," prompting Turkey to accuse him of inciting hatred.At a Mass in St. Peter's Square commemorating the massacre Sunday, Pope Francis underscored the "three massive and unprecedented tragedies" in the past century. "The first, which is widely considered 'the first genocide of the twentieth century,' struck your own Armenian people, the first Christian nation, as well as Catholic and Orthodox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks. Bishops and priests, religious, women and men, the elderly and even defenseless children and the infirm were murdered," the Pope said.Ankara immediately summoned the Vatican ambassador for a dressing down and recalled its own envoy.

"The Pope's statements, which are far from historical and judicial facts, cannot be accepted," Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter. "Religious offices are not places to incite hatred and revenge with baseless accusations."

Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes with Ottoman soldiers starting in 1915 when Armenia was part of the empire ruled from Istanbul but denied that hundreds of thousands were killed.

The late Pope John Paul II and Armenian Apostolic Church Supreme Patriarch Kerekin II also called the massacre "the first genocide of the 20th century" in 2001, but it was in a joint written statement, the report said.

In 2013, Pope Francis said the same phrase in a private meeting at the Vatican with an Armenian delegation, that also sparked protest from Ankara.

"It is the responsibility not only of the Armenian people and the universal Church to recall all that has taken place, but of the entire human family, so that the warnings from this tragedy will protect us from falling into a similar horror, which offends against God and human dignity," the Pope said of the massacre.

"Today too, in fact, these conflicts at times degenerate into unjustifiable violence, stirred up by exploiting ethnic and religious differences. All who are Heads of State and of International Organizations are called to oppose such crimes with a firm sense of duty, without ceding to ambiguity or compromise," he said.

It was not the first time that Turkey reacted strongly to the mention of the alleged genocide that took place a century ago. When the French parliament voted in 2011 to make Armenian genocide denial a crime, Turkey withdrew its ambassador, suspended joint military maneuvers and stopped political contacts with France.

Armenians contend that Turkey has not yet fully owned up to its wartime past.

Turks, on the other hand, saw the Pope's remarks as foreign interference by foreigners and wondered whether the U.S, a traditional ally of Turkey, would eventually use the word "genocide" to refer to the 1915 massacre.

Unlike most European and South American states that use the term, Washington has been avoiding its use, even warning legislators that Ankara could cut off military cooperation if they voted to adopt it.

"I believe Obama will call it a genocide as well, considering the influence of the Armenian population in the United States," said Serhat, a university student in Ankara. "It would surprise me if no one else called it a genocide."