2015年经济学人 梵蒂冈和土耳其 永世铭记

（单词翻译）

The Vatican and Turkey

Never forget

Forthrightness¹ about a past atrocity² provokes a strong reaction

IN 1915 Pope Benedict XV wrote to Mehmed V, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire,

saying that he could hear “the echo of the groans³ of an entire people…subjected to unspeakable sufferings”.

When the two leaders'modern-day counterparts met last November at the Turkish presidential palace outside Ankara, those echoes were still audible.

According to a new book by Franca Giansoldati, the Vatican-watcher of Il Messaggero, an Italian daily, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president,

“begged” Pope Francis to refrain from openly characterising the Ottoman Empire's slaughter⁴ of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.

The pope respected his host's wishes then. But on April 12th he abandoned tact⁵ and referred to the killings⁶ as “the first genocide of the 20th century”.

The Turkish government responded with outrage⁷ and recalled its ambassador to the Holy See for consultations⁸.

A vote in the European Parliament on April 15th, commending the pope's statement and urging Turkey to recognise the massacres⁹ as genocide,

further infuriated Mr Erdogan. “It is not possible for Turkey to accept such a crime, such a sin,” he said.

Francis has used the same phrase before, most recently in 2013 when he met an Armenian delegation¹⁰.

But that was scarcely reported, and the Turkish authorities merely expressed “disappointment” and called in the Vatican's envoy¹¹ for a ticking-off.

This time, he was making a much-awaited speech in front of Armenia's president, Serzh Sargsyan, days before the official centenary commemorations on April 24th.

Turkish diplomats¹² are understood to have set themselves two aims as the centenary approached:

to stop the mass at which Francis spoke¹³ being held on the day itself, and to prevent him from using the G-word.

They gained their first objective. In deciding to deny them their second, the pope and his diplomatic advisers¹⁴ had to weigh opposing factors.

The Vatican has long been the venue¹⁵ of a tug-of-war between proponents¹⁶ of careful dialogue with the Islamic world and advocates of bluntness,

who feel that tact has got Christians¹⁷ nowhere and that plain speaking is needed, even if it causes offence.

The plain-speakers had the upper hand under the previous pope, Benedict XVI. Francis's latest comment suggests they are back in the ascendancy¹⁸.