MOSCOW, July 8. /TASS/. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said that he is personally going to lead the campaign against the Armenian Apostolic Church.

According to the prime minister, the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the Church’s governing body, has been taken over by "an anti-national and anti-government group" and must be liberated. "I will be in charge of this liberation," he wrote on his Telegram channel.

Relations between Pashinyan and the country’s clergy have soured in recent years, particularly since the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin called for his resignation in 2020 and criticized his policy on unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh. A leading expert of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS), Konstantin Tasits, told TASS that during the 2021 election, Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II also did not support Pashinyan and "none of this has been forgotten." In his opinion, the criticism of Pashinyan’s policy course by the Armenian Church resulted in the prime minister wanting to replace Karekin II with another more loyal figure.

Recently, Pashinyan declared that Karekin II and some other archbishops do not observe their vow of chastity and must lose their clerical status. In turn, the Armenian Apostolic Church said that the Armenian authorities’ interference in the Mother See and the Church’s canonical principles is inadmissible and urged to release all detained clergymen.