Interview with Fr. Vahan Hovagimian, Head of Vienna Mekhitarists

For nearly 250 years the Mekhitarist Monastery of Vienna has retained its status as one of the major spiritual and cultural pillars of the Armenian Diaspora.

It was established in 1773, after a group of monks separated from the mother Venice congregation and moved to Trieste. In 1810 the congregation moved again, this time to Vienna, when Emperor Francis I of Austria (1804-1835) provided them with refuge in an abandoned Capucine abbey in the St. Ulrich suburb of the city.

The monastery includes a church, museum, library, and school. The library has the largest and the oldest collection of Armenian newspapers: some 170,000 volumes. The museum has one of the most significant Armenian coin collections, the oldest dating from the 4^th century B.C. It also has ancient tapestries, ceramics, maps, a huge globe of the world, old Armenian silver works, Bibles, paintings by Naghash Hovnatan and Ivan Aivazovsky, and cartoons by Alexander Saroukhan. Its 2,600-illuminated manuscript collection is the third-largest after that of Armenia and Jerusalem. The library also has an estimated 500,000 books. The street where the monastery is located is called Mechitaristengasse. It’s in the 7th district of Vienna.

The congregation was founded by Mekhitar Sebastatsi in Constantinople in 1701. After being forced out of the country and a brief stay in the Peloponessus, the monks established themselves in the San Lazzaro island of Venice.

The following interview with Father Vahan Hovagimian, the head of the Vienna monastery, was conducted in late fall.

What Pius XII Learned From the Armenian Genocide

Deborah Castellano Lubov

 

Though historians contest it, Pius XII is still accused of failing to do enough to help the Jews during World War II. In particular, he is criticized for too much silence.

But well-known German historian Michael Hesemann says the Pope's decision to be guarded in protest was a result of what he'd learned some years before, when while working in the Vatican Secretariat of State and as nuncio, he was privy to the Vatican's information on the Armenian genocide and its attempts to stop it.

Protests from Pope Benedict XV and his diplomats only made the situation worse for the Armenians and that was history Pius XII didn't want to repeat, Hesemann explains.

In an interview with Zenit ahead of Pope Francis' Nov. 28-30 trip to Turkey, Hesemann analyzes this massacre, and gives insight into the parallels with the Holocaust and Pius XII's actions during the war.