The Church Is Not His to Command

What The Prime Minister Is Actually Doing

Since 2024 -- and with accelerating intensity through 2025 and into 2026 -- the Pashinyan government has taken a sequence of actions that, read together, are not a dispute about taxes or property or regulation. They are a campaign of institutional subordination:

1. Public demand for the Catholicos's resignation. The Prime Minister has, on multiple public occasions, demanded that Catholicos Garegin II step down. This is not a constitutional power he possesses. No Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia has the legal authority to remove the Catholicos of All Armenians. The Catholicos is elected by the National Ecclesiastical Assembly -- a body composed of clerical and lay delegates from the Armenian Apostolic Church worldwide, including substantial diaspora representation. The Yerevan government has no standing in that process.
2. Arrest and criminal prosecution of clergy. Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan (Primate of the Tavush diocese) and other senior clergy have been arrested or held under criminal-process investigation. Whatever the specific legal pretexts, the pattern is unmistakable: the pressure points are clergy whose public positions have been in tension with Civil Contract.
3. Raids on the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin. Armed executive-branch raids on the physical premises of the Mother See have no precedent in the modern Republic. Even the Soviet period, with its explicit anti-religious policy, did not subject the Mother See to armed raids by a Yerevan government in the same pattern.
4. Religion Law rewrite. The National Assembly is currently processing amendments to the Law on Religious Organisations that materially alter the operating parameters of registered religious communities. The timing of the rewrite -- during the confrontation with the Church -- is the story. See OWL's prior investigation: From Etchmiadzin to the Law: Religion Law Rewritten During Church War.
5. Public verbal attacks on the Mother See itself. On April 21, 2026, the Prime Minister publicly declared: «Մեր Սուրբ Էջմիածինն աղտոտված, ախտահարված է» -- "Our Holy Etchmiadzin is polluted, infected." Three days before the April 24 Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. See OWL's investigation: "Holy Etchmiadzin Is Polluted, Infected": Pashinyan's Third Sacred-Site Attack in Five Days.

Any one of these five actions, in isolation, could be defended by the government as a specific legal or political initiative. Stacked together over twenty-four months, they are not five independent actions. They are one campaign with five instruments.

What Armenian Constitutional Law Says

LEGAL RECORD The Constitution of the Republic of Armenia, Article 17, addresses the Armenian Apostolic Church directly:

Read this carefully. The Constitution recognizes the Church's mission. It does not subordinate the Church. It does not regulate the Catholicate. It does not grant the executive branch any power over canonical or ecclesiastical affairs. What Article 17 does is acknowledge the Church as a pre-existing institution whose national mission predates the Armenian state and whose continued operation is protected by constitutional recognition.

This is the exact opposite of an establishment clause that subordinates a church to a state. In the Armenian constitutional order, the Church is not a department of the government. The government is a younger institution that recognises the Church as older than itself and as carrying a mission the state cannot replicate.

What Canonical Law Says

The Armenian Apostolic Church is governed by its own canon law, which has been continuously developed since the Council of Dvin (506 AD) and earlier. The Catholicos of All Armenians is the supreme spiritual leader, elected by the National Ecclesiastical Assembly for life. Canonical removal of a Catholicos requires procedures internal to the Church -- not executive action by any secular government, Armenian or otherwise.

This is not a theological nicety. It is a hard institutional fact. The Catholicos of All Armenians leads a Church whose jurisdiction extends beyond the territory of the Republic of Armenia. Diaspora dioceses -- Russia, the United States, France, the Middle East, South America, Australia -- are under the Mother See of Etchmiadzin, not under the Republic of Armenia's executive. A Catholicos removed by an Armenian Prime Minister's pressure but not by canonical process would remain, canonically, the Catholicos -- while the government would have created a schism it lacks the authority to heal.

What The Historical Record Says

Across seventeen centuries, Armenian secular power and Armenian ecclesiastical power have existed in complex relationship. At times -- particularly in stateless periods after the fall of successive Armenian kingdoms -- the Church was the institutional continuity of the Armenian nation. The fact of Armenian identity's survival through Byzantine, Arab, Seljuk, Mongol, Ottoman, Persian, and Russian imperial rule is a fact primarily attributable to the Church, not to any Armenian state (because for most of those centuries, there was no Armenian state).

Even under explicit hostility -- the Soviet period, when the state was formally atheist and actively suppressed religious institutions -- the Catholicate at Etchmiadzin continued. Catholicoi were elected. The Church survived. The Soviet state, for all its coercive apparatus, understood that it could not destroy the Catholicate without producing a diaspora schism that would be politically and diplomatically disastrous. The Soviet state made accommodations. The post-Soviet independent Armenian state made accommodations. Only the current government -- in a democracy whose constitutional text explicitly recognises the Church's exclusive national mission -- has treated the Catholicate as an obstacle to be dismantled.

Why This Cannot Be Framed As "The Church Meddles In Politics"

The Prime Minister and his media ecosystem have framed the conflict as a response to political meddling by the Church -- as if the Catholicos were organising street protests against Civil Contract and the government were defending itself. This framing does not survive contact with the record.

What the Catholicos and senior clergy have actually done, publicly:

• Performed religious services on national holidays, including April 24.
• Delivered pastoral statements on the ethical stakes of the 2020 war and the 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh -- statements consistent with 1,725 years of Armenian Church pastoral practice.
• Declined to publicly endorse Civil Contract's policy positions when those positions conflicted with the Church's pastoral assessment.
• Provided humanitarian coordination for displaced Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians through diocesan networks.
• Not organised political parties. Not run candidates. Not instructed parishioners how to vote.

The last bullet is the load-bearing one. The Catholicos has not crossed the line into secular political organising. What he has done is decline to cross the line into secular political endorsement of the sitting government. Those are very different things, and the conflation of the two is the rhetorical foundation of the Pashinyan campaign.

Why The Timing Matters -- Genocide Remembrance Day

April 24, 2026 is the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. 1.5 million Armenians dead. The national liturgical commemoration, by tradition and by constitutional recognition of the Church's national mission, is led by the Catholicos from Etchmiadzin. The Prime Minister's April 21 attack on Etchmiadzin landed three days before the day his country mourns.

This is not coincidence. The attempt to delegitimise the Mother See before April 24 is an attempt to disrupt the one ceremonial moment in the Armenian year when the Church's institutional authority is maximally visible to both the domestic public and the diaspora. If the Catholicate's standing can be degraded before April 24, the remembrance itself can be quietly re-framed as a state event led by Civil Contract, rather than a national event led by the institution that has led it for a century.

This is not a domestic Armenian political calculation. It is a calculation about the symbolic architecture of Armenian national identity in the middle of a geopolitical realignment. See OWL's same-day investigation: Western Anchor Day: NATO + EU + Macron.

What A Lawful Government Would Do -- And Does Not

A government that disagreed with specific pastoral positions of the Church, in a constitutional order like Armenia's, has several legitimate avenues:

• Publish written government statements disagreeing with the pastoral position on specified grounds.
• Invite the Catholicos to formal consultations on issues of national interest.
• Propose, via normal parliamentary process, specific legislation on matters within state jurisdiction -- taxation, property, registration -- with full public debate and due consultation.
• Respect the outcome of canonical processes inside the Church, even when those outcomes are politically inconvenient.
• Observe constitutional Article 17 in substance and not only in form.

None of this is what the Pashinyan government has done. The government has instead proceeded with the instruments of coercion: arrests, raids, verbal delegitimisation, and legislative rewrites carried out during -- not before -- the confrontation.

What This Looks Like From Outside Armenia

International religious-freedom observers, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the European Union's religious freedom dossier, Council of Europe reporting, and Armenian diaspora organisations in the United States, France, Russia and the Middle East have all made observations consistent with the pattern described above. The Pashinyan government has not been sanctioned for these actions -- because the geopolitical alignment priorities of Western capitals (to anchor Armenia away from Moscow) outrank, for the moment, their religious-freedom concerns.

This is a temporary protection. When the geopolitical calculation shifts -- when a Western capital decides the cost of defending Pashinyan's church policy is higher than the benefit of the Armenian security alignment -- the record of arrests, raids, and verbal attacks will still be on the record. The Catholicate keeps receipts. So does the diaspora.

What OWL Will Track

• Whether the April 24, 2026 commemoration at Tsitsernakaberd is led by the Catholicos in the traditional manner, or whether the government attempts to compress the Church's role.
• Whether the Religion Law amendments pass the National Assembly before the June 7 election, and in what form.
• Whether any additional clergy arrests are made between now and June 7.
• Whether the Catholicos issues a formal statement in response to the April 21 «aghtotvats, akhtaharvats» attack.
• Whether diaspora dioceses issue coordinated responses and in what register.

Cross-References Inside OWL

• "Holy Etchmiadzin Is Polluted, Infected": April 21 Attack on the Mother See
• Religion Law Rewritten During Church War
• "Putin's Slave": April 21 Attack on Church-Defending Karapetyan
• Western Anchor Day: NATO + EU + Macron
• Manasyan's Silence on the Vardanyan Appeal

Closing

The Church is not the Prime Minister's to command. It was not his predecessor's. It was not the Soviet government's. It was not the Ottoman government's. It was not the Persian government's, across five centuries. Through all of those, the Catholicate persisted by the one principle that has kept it alive since AD 301: that its authority does not derive from the secular ruler of the moment, and therefore cannot be withdrawn by that ruler.

The current Prime Minister can continue the arrests. He can continue the raids. He can continue the verbal attacks. He can push the Religion Law amendments through a compliant parliament. None of these actions change the institutional fact that the Mother See outlasts governments. The next Armenian government will inherit a Church it cannot remake either -- and, if it governs lawfully, will not try to.

Sources

• Constitution of the Republic of Armenia, Article 17.
• Armenian Apostolic Church canon law and National Ecclesiastical Assembly procedures.
• Pashinyan statement on Etchmiadzin, April 21, 2026 (armtimes.com, 1in.am, bavnews.am, oragir.news).
• Prior OWL investigations on religion law, sacred site attacks, and Church-state conflict (cross-linked above).
• US Commission on International Religious Freedom Armenia reporting, 2024-2026.
• Historical record of Catholicate at Etchmiadzin, AD 301 to present, as documented in Armenian ecclesiastical history.

OWL is an anonymous Armenian investigative journalism platform. We take no money from any political party, bloc, movement, oligarch, foreign government, or foundation. OWL is not affiliated with the Armenian Apostolic Church and takes no ecclesiastical position. The argument of this article is institutional, constitutional, and historical -- not theological.

← Back to OWL