For more than two decades the authorities have allowed prison chaplains to talk to inmates and even hold religious services for them. One of them, Father Grigor Hovannisian, has visited Yerevan’s Nubarashen prison, the largest in the country, on a weekly basis since 2011.
The Armenian Justice Ministry’s Penitentiary Service confirmed earlier this week that Hovannisian was stripped of that access last month. In a statement to Aysor.am, it claimed that he “made political statements and carried out propaganda” inside the prison. It did not elaborate on the claim denied by Hovannisian.
“When I speak of one’s love for their country, homeland, nation, is this politics?” the priest told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Hovannisian lamented his inability to perform on Sunday Easter services at Nubarashen for individuals serving prison sentences there.
“They repeatedly called me, saying that they are waiting for me,” he said. “They have now been deprived of all that. They have been deprived of the main meaning of their life.”
Archimandrite Isahak Poghosian, head of the church’s 8-strong prison chaplain division, reported a similar ban imposed on another priest who has for years provided spiritual care to inmates of a prison near the northern city of Vanadzor.
“We have never had problems with mutual respect and communication at those institutions,” Poghosian said, criticizing the bans as “weird.”
Earlier this year, dozens of chaplains were removed from the Armenian army ranks after reportedly refusing to back Pashinian’s controversial campaign against the supreme head of the church. Defense Minister Suren Papikian effectively abolished the army’s Spiritual Service that had been jointly set up by the Armenian government and the church nearly three decades ago.
Pashinian began pressuring Garegin to resign last June shortly after the Catholicos accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during an international conference in Switzerland. Three archbishops and one bishop were arrested in the following months on different charges strongly denied by them. Three of them have been moved to house arrest in February and March.
Also, law-enforcement authorities indicted but did not arrest Garegin himself as well as six other clergymen. They were banned from leaving the country to attend an emergency episcopal conference held in Austria in February.