History can be used to provoke and propagandize as much as to illuminate — and that may be the most lasting lesson from a conference held April 10 at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. 

The conference, titled “Christianity in Azerbaijan: History and Modernity,” was organized by the Baku International Center for Multiculturalism, the Institute of History and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijan Embassy to the Holy See, and the Albanian-Udi Christian Community of Azerbaijan. Notably, all of these entities are wholly or largely reliant on the government of Azerbaijan — an oil-rich country in the Caucasus that has been ruled by the same family for 31 of the 35 years since its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The event, held at a pontifical university and with welcoming letters from Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, and Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Dicastery for Oriental Churches, fueled an ongoing, bitter dispute between Azerbaijan and its Christian neighbors — Georgia and especially Armenia — over ethnicity, propaganda, ancient Christian history and deadly modern politics.

Fierce backlash followed. Armenian civil groups and leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church — which is not in full communion with the Holy See — issued strong condemnations. Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia in Beirut; the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem; and the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin — the spiritual center of the Church and seat of Catholicos Karekin II, its supreme head — all denounced the gathering. The Mother See’s April 11 statement called the event “anti-Armenian” and expressed regret that “such an anti-scholarly event was allowed to take place under the roof of a prominent Catholic educational institution.” Karekin II has met with Pope Francis at least three times, the last time in 2021, in efforts to strengthen ties between the Catholic Church and “the world’s oldest Christian nation.”

The enmity between Azerbaijan and Armenians — including the ethnic cleansing of the Armenian Christian community from the Nagorno-Karabakh region in 2023 — is well-known. Less well-known are two additional factors: Azerbaijan’s deep-pocketed international lobbying efforts, sometimes referred to as “caviar diplomacy,” and Baku’s zealous efforts to rewrite the history of the Caucasus — particularly its Christian heritage — by erasing the ancient presence of Armenians, Armenian Christianity and even Armenian monuments, churches, cross-stones, cemeteries and inscriptions in the Armenian script. 

In its place, Azerbaijani authorities have seized upon the presence of a tiny non-Armenian Christian community (estimated at 4,000-5,000, though the numbers are often inflated or politicized) to use as a stalking horse or symbolic replacement. This “Albanian-Udi” community has received government largesse and has been granted ownership of several ancient Armenian churches and monasteries. The apparent goal is to counter a central Armenian claim — compelling to Western audiences — that Armenians are an ancient Christian people who once inhabited large parts of what today is Azerbaijan (and parts of Turkey), and that they have been persecuted by the Azerbaijani Muslims. 

So, the Baku government exaggerates and mischaracterizes a small remnant community to use as a rhetorical weapon against the Armenians — as if to say, “We are not anti-Christian; no, we are anti-Armenian. These other people you’ve never heard of — they’re the real native Christian population. The Armenians came later, brought in by Russians or Persians.” 

No wonder the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem bitterly called the university event “a state-sponsored act of revisionism and pseudo-historiography that falls so humiliatingly below the standards of the Vatican that there is no plausible explanation except financial incentive” — capitalizing the statement for emphasis. 

It is indeed a bit odd that this event was held — not only because of the sensitivity of Azeri-Armenian relations, the fresh wound of Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan's saber-rattling against Armenia proper — but also because what Azerbaijan has done, minus the caviar, has been done before by various regimes, including against the Catholic Church: creating a state-sponsored religious body to serve as a substitute or fake replacement for an inconvenient Church. 

In Sandinista-run Nicaragua in the 1980s, it was a pro-regime “liberationist” church set up in opposition to the Church hierarchy. In Mexico, during the height of the savage persecution of Catholics in the 1920s, the state promoted its own substitute — the Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana (ICAM) — to serve as a pro-regime religious body. The Nazis in Germany promoted their own “Reich Church” to replace the Confessing Church. Closer to home, the nationalist Turkish government under Atatürk supported the founding of a pro-regime Turkish Orthodox Church in 1922 as a replacement for the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.

In all of these cases, the regime-sponsored replacement was never strong enough to supplant the original. That appears also to be true of the tiny Albanian-Udi community. Most remaining Christians in Azerbaijan are Russian or Georgian Orthodox. There seems to be only one Catholic parish in the entire country. The U.S. State Department’s 2023 report on religious freedom in Azerbaijan is damning. UN and EU rapporteurs on cultural rights have expressed concern about the erasing of Armenian heritage in the country in favor of a fabricated “Caucasian-Albanian” narrative, and the vast majority of experts in the region’s art, architecture and archaeology have “rejected these revisionist claims as false.”

Time will tell whether any goodwill the Vatican may gain in Baku by hosting this conference will outweigh the damage done to ecumenical relations with Armenian Christians worldwide. Sadly, the event has already overshadowed one important development: the  March 31papal decree announcing the canonization of Ignatius Shoukrallah Maloyan, an Armenian Catholic bishop martyred during the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians in 1915.