YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. For Fort Wayne developer Zohrab Tazian, it was like having the pope in his guest room. But when His Holiness Aram I of the Armenian Apostolic Church visited his old friend this week while traveling from Pittsburgh to Chicago, there was more than fellowship on his mind. As reports “Armenpress”, The News-Sentinel stated this in a recent article.

Less than a month after the world commemorated the 100th anniversary of the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, Aram spoke with passion and concern about how mass murder continues today as the fragmented world watches in horror but refuses to unite against it, or, at times, refuses even to call both crimes what they are: genocide.

“I don’t care about labels. Violence is violence, and what ISIL is doing is a new form of genocide, a crime against humanity. But recognition of the Armenian genocide is a must because to prevent (genocide today) there must be a clear understanding of what happened in the past. Accountability is important,” said Aram, who has served as Catholicos of the Catholicosate of Cilicia since 1995. As such, he co-leads the 10 million-member denomination that is the world’s oldest national church. And although the Catholicosate of Cilicia (the result of war and mass migration in 1045) acknowledges a “primacy of honor” to the Catholicosate of all Armenians in Etchmiadzin, Armenia, Aram is the spiritual head of about 1.5 million Armenians in the United States, including a handful of families in Fort Wayne. 

For that reason, Tazian called the visit by Aram, whom he first met 20 years ago at a church conference in Lebanon, “the highest honor you can get. It’s gratifying, and humbling.” 

Aram sought to humble the world when he spoke in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago during services to commemorate the World War I-inspired genocide, which President Obama promised to identify as such but has failed to do so, apparently to avoid offending Turkey.  “Silence is another form of genocide,” he said from the pulpit of the National Cathedral, and even though he was referring to something that happened a century ago, his words were are timely as today’s headlines.

If the world will not come to grips with the past, Aram told me, it is not surprising that it has so far failed to mount a unified assault against ISIL and other forms of Islamic extremism. That extremism has resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of Christians in the Middle East, many of them members of the Armenian Church, along with Muslims and members of other faiths considered infidels.

But that response must not be limited to the military, he said. Religion is part of the problem but it can also be part of the solution, with people of faith -- especially Muslims -- uniting around common moral principles of understanding and tolerance.

Even so, the 68-year-old churchman who has worked to promote dialogue between Christians and Muslims rejects the notion that Islam is the problem despite ISIL’s hoped-for caliphate.

“Christians lived with Muslims for centuries in Armenia. Co-habitation has been a reality, so it’s wrong to say there’s a problem between Christians and Muslims. There needs to be a different perspective. Muslim extremism doesn’t have a religious purpose. It’s being used for political purposes. The Arab world must take the driver’s seat to stop it.”

Aram insists the world must confront all forms of genocide, past and present, if it hopes to deter them in the future. “Today, for geopolitical reasons, some call (the Armenian genocide) a ‘great tragedy’ or a ‘massacre.’ But we claim justice, which is a gift of God. Justice is the core of human rights, and to reject it is a sin,” he said in Washington. “Any society not built on the values of justice is a source of evil and intolerance.”

Then, quoting Christ, he added: “The truth frees us.”

Yes, but only if you recognize, acknowledge and, if necessary, confront it. As George Santayana wrote in “The Life of Reason” a full decade before the Armenian holocaust, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Such as when, last September, ISIL blew up an Armenian church in Deir ez-Zor, Syria.