Father Hovhannes Abegha Torgomyan writes:
"When the work of "reforming" the Church appears in the hands of such people who in the past did not stand out with any serious spiritual, theological or public authority and became known to the public only after their dissolution, thanks to gossip, slander and noisy statements, perhaps one can already imagine what kind of "reforms" we are talking about.
However, there is a more interesting and at the same time eloquent circumstance here: personal insult is presented as an ideology, and personal problems as a "church crisis".
Yesterday, one of the news outlets published an interview of a certain Harutyun Harutyunyan, presenting him as a theologian. Harutyunyan, who is now a former clergyman, came on the air to actually record one thing: the failure of their so-called "reformers" group. But, instead of looking for the reasons for their own failure in their own activities, he pointed the arrows towards the authorities, implying that, in his opinion, the problems that arose in the Church should be solved in the National Assembly and with the intervention of the political authorities.
In other words, people who have been accusing the Church for years of getting involved in politics, today they themselves propose to transfer church issues to the field of political power and solve them with the intervention of the authorities.
Harutyunyan declares that their small group of "reformers" have discovered some irreversible problems within the Church and are trying to present them as a universal crisis. However, a simple question arises here. Is it the Church that is in crisis or the person who was once a student of the seminary, whose education, living and preparation was personally dealt with by the Catholicos of All Armenians, then he was given the opportunity to continue his education abroad?
Harutyunyan was also the acting inspector of the Vazgenyan Spiritual School in Sevan. However, as a result of his disobedient course, he was declared disorganized and ranked among the laity.
This is not just a biographical fact. This is an important circumstance in order to understand where his "reformist" judgments are born today. When a person cannot come to terms with the consequences of his own choices, there is a great danger that he will try to present his personal failure as the failure of the whole structure.
Unfortunately, a person who has traveled such a path today expresses thoughts that raise serious doubts about the level of his knowledge and judgment. Speaking about the World Council of Churches, he declares that the structure is against the TRIPP project, claims that it is part of some anti-American lobbying, and that is why he expressed support to the Catholicos of All Armenians.
With such a statement, the person is actually trying to explain the position of the world church structure representing hundreds of millions of believers and uniting around two hundred churches with baseless political labels.
If a person makes such judgments about international church structures, then perhaps he should first review his own awareness, instead of conducting interviews on TV.
Harutyunyan characterizes the patriarchal structure of the Armenian Church as an "authoritarian regime", and divides the clergy in their circle into different "camps". It turns out that the movement, which was originally presented as a unity around "reforms", today has already turned into mutual suspicions, labels and internal camps.
Today one thing is already clear. when the "reformation" of the Church is handed over to people whose driving force is not love for the Church, but personal hatred and revenge, nothing is reformed as a result. On the contrary, contradictions deepen, mistrust increases, and those who sincerely believed in those appeals suffer the most.
Finally, it is enough to look at the activities of the Armenian Church in the last 27 years to understand a simple truth. real reforms are not carried out by loud announcements, creating "camps" and demanding the intervention of the political authorities. In these years, the Armenian Church has really gone through the path of reforms, and these changes have not remained words, but have given visible results. The best proof of those results are the strong and strong positions of the Armenian Church today. And, perhaps, this is the biggest inconvenience for those who have been trying for years to present the Church as a structure in an "irreversible crisis".
Whoever has ears to hear should listen."
