One church, two thrones.
The Catholicos of All Armenians sits at Etchmiadzin and the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia at Antelias in Lebanon. Both consecrate bishops and bless the Muron; Etchmiadzin holds primacy of honour. The arrangement is medieval in origin, hardened by the Cold War, and it still produces jurisdictional quarrels in the diaspora — most visibly in North America, where two parallel dioceses cover the same cities.
The Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia dates from the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and settled at Antelias, north of Beirut, in 1930 after the genocide. During the Cold War the Soviet-controlled Mother See and the Lebanon-based Cilician see became proxies in diaspora politics, and in 1933 the Armenian archbishop of New York was murdered at the altar in a dispute along the same fault line. The two sees have been formally reconciled since 1995 and still maintain parallel dioceses in the United States, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Greece and Iran. There are also two Armenian patriarchates, Jerusalem and Constantinople, which are not catholicosates and do not consecrate Muron.
Both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith, and the unbroken continuity of the apostolic tradition, though they have used Christological terms in different ways.
Second Agreed Statement of the Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, Chambesy, Geneva, 1990The Armenian Apostolic Church was a signatory; both its catholicosates were represented in the dialogue.
The same ground, other faiths
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