Powers of Several Members of the Supreme Spiritual Council Terminated
The powers of several members of the Supreme Spiritual Council have been terminated. A statement to this effect was issued by the bishops demanding the resignation of the Catholicos of All Armenians.
According to the statement, on December 15, Catholicos Karekin II informed several members of the Supreme Spiritual Council that he had terminated their powers by patriarchal decree, without specifying the grounds or reasons for the decision.
The bishops note that some of the high-ranking clergy were elected as members of the Supreme Spiritual Council for a four-year term by the Ecclesiastical Representative Assembly convened at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin on June 6–8, 2017. According to them, pursuant to the statute, an Ecclesiastical Representative Assembly must be convened every two years, and in the event of the termination of the powers of members whose four-year term has expired, new elections must be organized.
The bishops demanding the Catholicos’s resignation claim that the executive body of the Armenian Apostolic Church has continued to operate in violation of the statute of the Supreme Spiritual Council. They also point out that the current statutes lack regulations that could justify the prolonged failure to convene meetings of the church’s highest bodies.
The authors of the statement assess that the Catholicos’s unilateral and irregular decisions have led to a management crisis within the Mother See and the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church. In this context, they reaffirmed their demand for the Catholicos of All Armenians to retire, emphasizing the necessity of developing and adopting a new statute.
The bishops also declared that they consider the meeting of the Supreme Spiritual Council, convened by the Catholicos and scheduled for December 18 at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, to be invalid, and that decisions made by that body after 2021 may be viewed as unlawful.