Pashinian stepped up his nearly monthlong campaign against Garegin and other senior clerics after the church expressed “deep concern” over Wednesday's arrests of Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian and 14 of his supporters accused of plotting to seize power through “terrorist acts.”
Galstanian, who led last year massive antigovernment demonstrations in Yerevan, denies the accusations. Armenia’s leading opposition groups have likewise described the case as politically motivated, dismissing Pashinian’s claims that security services have foiled a coup attempt.
The church’s Supreme Spiritual Council cast doubt on the credibility of the coup allegations in a statement issued late on Wednesday following an emergency meeting chaired by Garegin.
“Public trust in the legal process is undermined by the fact that from the outset the prime minister of the Republic of Armenia and various representatives of the ruling party have sought -- through public statements with evident political intent -- to direct the actions of law-enforcement authorities,” read the statement.
“Equally deplorable is the deliberate attempt to artificially associate this legal process with the Church and to exploit the name of the Mother See -- an approach that fits squarely within the broader context of the anti-Church campaign initiated by the current authorities,” it said, adding that the Mother See “will pursue justice through all lawful means.”
Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian slams the top clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the parliament, Yerevan, June 18, 2025.
Pashinian responded the following morning by reiterating his demands for Garegin to vacate the seat of the Catholicos in Echmiadzin.
“If he does not leave voluntarily, the faithful flock of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church will remove him, in a Christian manner,” the premier warned in a social media post.
A deputy chairman of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party, Vahagn Aleskanian, accused the top clergy of “supporting the terrorists” and said Garegin must be “thrown out” of his headquarters.
The threats were construed by some opposition activists as a prelude to a violent assault on the Mother See. One of them, lawyer Ruben Melikian, claimed that Pashinian will order plainclothes law-enforcement officers to storm the official residence of the Catholicos.
“We must be ready to leave all our affairs at any moment and go to the Mother See to protect our sacred relics, our Armenian identity, and our God-given right to breathe and exist,” Melikian wrote on Facebook.
Pashinian already raised fears of such a seizure on June 10 when he pledged to set up a special body tasked with replacing Garegin II. Opposition groups called the move unconstitutional, saying that the Armenian Church is legally separated from the state. They urged supporters to be ready to rally in Echmiadzin in support of Garegin.
Armenia - Armenian opposition supporters join a religious festival in Echmiadzin, June 22, 2025.
Garegin received on June 11 a hero’s welcome from hundreds of people, most of them opposition supporters, at Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport on his return from a short trip abroad. He again condemned Pashinian’s efforts to depose him during a religious festival held in Echmiadzin on June 22.
Pashinian’s relationship with the Armenian Church has increasingly deteriorated since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Garegin and other senior clergymen have joined the opposition in blaming him for Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war and Azerbaijan’s recapture of Karabakh in 2023.
Pashinian began accusing them of breaching their vows of celibacy right after Garegin attended and addressed late last month an international conference in Switzerland on the preservation of Karabakh’s Armenian religious and cultural heritage. The conference organized by the World Council of Churches was denounced by Azerbaijan’s top Shia Muslim cleric close to the government.
Pashinian’s detractors say that he launched his campaign against the church in an effort to please Azerbaijan and/or neutralize a key source of opposition to his unilateral concessions to Armenia’s arch-foe. The premier has denied that.