The Non-Response
On Republic Day 2026, with the government holding its parade in Republic Square under the Aragats tribune that OWL's 28 May coverage documented, Catholicos Garegin II travelled to the Sardarapat memorial in Armavir marz. He laid flowers at the 1918 battlefield memorial -- the founding site of Armenian statehood. He met the small number of opposition figures who also attended. He took no government delegation; the government sent no senior official.
Azatutyun.am journalists at Sardarapat attempted to ask the Catholicos about Civil Contract's reported plans to engineer his removal from the Catholicosal throne. He declined to answer. Not a single question on the topic received a response. He completed his Sardarapat visit, returned to Etchmiadzin, and the silence was the entirety of the public statement.
Why Silence Is a Statement
A head of a major institution refusing to answer questions about a campaign against him can mean several things. It can mean he has nothing prepared to say. It can mean he is being advised, by counsel or by his synod, to make no statement that could be used against him in either canonical or civil proceedings. It can mean he regards the questions as illegitimate and refuses to dignify them. It can mean he is preparing a response to be delivered elsewhere and at a different time.
In the specific case of Garegin II in the specific institutional position of the Catholicos of All Armenians, the silence reads most plausibly as a combination of the second and third options. The Armenian Apostolic Church is a canonical institution with internal procedures for matters concerning its hierarchs; the Catholicos is not a politician trading campaign statements. Engaging the Pashinyan government's framing on Pashinyan's terms -- in a campaign-period press scrum at a national memorial -- would concede the framing. Refusing to engage preserves the canonical position that the question of who occupies the Catholicosal throne is not a matter for state political bodies to determine.
The Year-Long Confrontation
OWL has been documenting the church-state confrontation across the past year. The reported Civil Contract plan to engineer Garegin II's removal -- the precise mechanism of which has not been publicly specified by the party but which has been openly discussed in pro-government press -- is the most direct expression of the conflict's state-against-church dimension. The clergy prosecutions, the church-property cases, the police actions at religious gatherings, and the broader pattern of harassment OWL has covered in its Church-State Dossier are the lower-level manifestations.
The Catholicos's public posture across the year has been one of canonical reserve. He has not entered the political fray. He has not endorsed opposition candidates. He has not made campaign-trail statements. He has continued his liturgical and pastoral functions and has declined to be drawn into the campaign's polemics. The 28 May Sardarapat silence is the continuation of that posture at a high-visibility moment.
The Institutional Stakes
The Armenian Apostolic Church is, by any reasonable historical measure, the oldest continuously functioning state-church institution in the world. Armenia adopted Christianity as its state religion in 301 AD under King Tiridates III, twelve years before the Edict of Milan and eighty years before Theodosius made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. The Catholicos of All Armenians is the senior canonical authority of the church and one of the most ancient continuously-held religious offices in Christendom. A modern political party engineering the removal of a sitting Catholicos for political reasons would represent an institutional rupture without precedent in Armenian history.
Whether Civil Contract actually possesses the capacity to engineer the removal is a separate question from whether it has stated the intent. The mechanism by which a sitting Catholicos can be removed is canonical, not political: it would require action by the Supreme Spiritual Council of the Holy See of Etchmiadzin under the canons of the church, not a parliamentary vote or a Prime Ministerial decree. A political party with no canonical standing cannot directly remove a Catholicos. What it can do is pressure -- through control of state resources, through prosecution of allied clergy, through legal harassment of church holdings -- to create conditions in which the Spiritual Council might be induced to act.
Why This Matters for the Vote
Eight days before the 7 June parliamentary election, the Catholicos's silence is, in effect, a refusal to be conscripted into the campaign by either side. He has not endorsed the opposition. He has not denounced the ruling party. He has continued his canonical duties and declined the questions. Voters who experience this as the moral authority's refusal to participate in a debased political contest will read the silence one way. Voters who read it as the church's implicit alignment against a government openly hostile to it will read it another way.
Either reading is defensible. OWL is documenting the silence itself, as a documentable act: the Catholicos was asked about a stated plan to remove him from his throne; he did not answer; he completed his Republic Day pilgrimage; he returned to Etchmiadzin. That is the documented record. The political weight that record carries on 7 June is the voters' to assign.
Sources: Azatutyun.am, 29 May 2026 (Garegin II Sardarapat non-response) · Azatutyun.am, 28 May 2026 (Catholicos at Sardarapat) · Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin · OWL, 28 May 2026 (Two Republic Days)