Who is Archbishop Ignatius Maloyan, Armenian martyr?

In a few days, the portrait of Bishop Ignatius Maloyan will be hung on the facade of St. Peter's Basilica in anticipation of his canonization. Now 110 years after his assassination by Turkish officers of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian Catholic Archbishop of Mardin will be recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church.

Choukrallah Maloyan was born in 1869 in Mardin, a city located in the southeast of present-day Turkey, on the border with Syria. He then left to study in Bzommar, a village in the Lebanese mountains that is one of the capitals of the Armenian Catholic Patriarchate. He was ordained a priest under the name Ignatius, in memory of the great martyr saint of Antioch, celebrated October 17.

The young priest was sent as a missionary to Alexandria and Cairo. There, his talents caught the attention of Patriarch Boghos Bedros XII Sabbaghian, who made him his private secretary. He then returned to his diocese of Mardin to assist the local bishop, who was very elderly.

In 1911, he was chosen to be the archbishop of his native diocese. A biography on the Vatican website reports that he supervised the spiritual and pastoral training of his priests, devoted time to visiting the faithful, reopened schools, and restored churches. It also states that he “maintained good relations with the country's high dignitaries,” with the sultan even going so far as to award him a distinction.

But in 1915, Armenians living in Turkey began to be persecuted, and the archbishopric of Mardin became a target. On April 30, soldiers surrounded it, under the pretext of finding weapons there. In early May, knowing he was in danger, Archbishop Maloyan gathered his priests and read them his last will and testament, in which he preached martyrdom.

On June 3, 1915, the Turks arrested him along with 27 members of his community.

Beaten and tortured, Archbishop Maloyan was sentenced to death. The head of the gendarmerie gave him a choice: convert to Islam or be executed. The archbishop replied on behalf of his peers: “We have never been unfaithful to the state ... but if you want us to be unfaithful to our religion, that will never, ever happen.”

“That will never happen,” his faithful repeated.

The 46-year-old archbishop was shot with a revolver. “The bullet went through the back of his neck. He fell to the ground and, before giving up his soul, exclaimed: ‘Lord, have mercy on me, into your hands I commend my spirit,’” according to the Vatican website.

The Archbishop of Mardin was one of the first victims of the Armenian genocide, a massacre of nearly 1.5 million people perpetrated between 1915 and 1923, now recognized by some 30 countries. The Republic of Turkey totally rejects this recognition.

Today, on the website of the dicastery for the Causes of Saints, as in the homily delivered by John Paul II during his beatification in 2001, the term “genocide” does not appear.

Pope Francis was the first pope to openly use the term genocide in this regard. It was in 2016, during a speech at the Presidential Palace in Yerevan.

The Turkish Deputy Prime Minister at the time considered the use of this term “regrettable.”

“Unfortunately, it is possible to see all the reflections and traces of the Crusader mentality in the actions of the papacy and the pope,” he stated.

The canonization of Bishop Ignatius Maloyan comes at a particularly sensitive time, as Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to visit Turkey from November 27 to 30 for the celebrations marking the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. On his first trip abroad, the new pope is expected to be received by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Several Vatican sources have told I.MEDIA that the Holy See is somewhat "embarrassed" by the coincidence of this canonization with the Pope's trip to Turkey.