Armenian rite, Roman communion, and the same 1915.
The Armenian church in full communion with Rome, with a Catholicos-Patriarch of Cilicia whose convent is at Bzommar in Lebanon and whose see is in Beirut. It uses the Armenian Badarak and the Armenian calendar, and it lost clergy and people in the 1915 genocide on the same scale as the Apostolic church did.
DeitiesOne God in three persons; Chalcedonian christology, in the Armenian rite the church shares with the Apostolic church.
Founded1742 CE · Aleppo, and from 1749 Bzommar in Lebanon
FounderAbraham-Pierre I Ardzivian, elected patriarch in 1740 and confirmed by Rome in 1742
AfterlifeResurrection and judgment; Catholic teaching, with Armenian commemorations of the dead.
TextsThe Armenian Bible · The Badarak in the Armenian rite · The Armenian Catholic liturgical books
The map
The Armenian Catholic Church’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1596 CE The Eastern Catholic Churches 1742 CE The Armenian Catholic Church
Armenian in rite, Catholic in communion.
The church uses the Armenian liturgy, the Armenian calendar and Classical Armenian, and holds Catholic doctrine including papal primacy. Its head is a Catholicos-Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians, elected by the Armenian Catholic synod and confirmed by the pope, with the patriarchal convent at Bzommar in Lebanon and the see in Beirut.
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A second Armenian church: bridge or wound.
Armenian Catholics describe their church as Armenians in communion with the wider church; Armenian Apostolic writers have described the union of 1742 as a division worked by missionaries in a nation that could not afford one. Both churches buried their dead together in 1915, and both say so.
⚖ contested within
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B
Blessed Ignatius Maloyan.
Archbishop of Mardin, arrested in June 1915, tortured, offered his life if he converted to Islam, and killed with a column of his people on the road out of the city on 11 June. He was fifty-five. John Paul II beatified him in October 2001, on the feast of the Armenian translators.
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The Badarak, in the Armenian rite.
The liturgy is the Armenian one — the same text, the same music, the same unleavened bread and unmixed wine as the Apostolic church uses — with the pope named in the intercessions. An Apostolic Armenian walking into an Armenian Catholic church would recognise nearly everything.
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