The church officially voiced support for Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian and his backers on May 7 as they marched to Yerevan to demand Pashinian’s resignation over his controversial territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. Pashinian’s political allies accused it of meddling in politics. One of them, parliament speaker Alen Simonian, said on May 21 the church should be taxed like Armenian businesses. Pashinian hinted that such measures are imminent.
The church currently pays income tax and customs duties on goods and raw materials imported by it. It is exempt from property tax. Tsovinar Vartanian, the chairwoman of the Armenian parliament committee on finance and budgetary affairs, said she and her pro-government colleagues want to scrap this exemption.
“At the moment, we are looking into thousands of properties managed by the church,” she said. “I’m talking not about monasteries but commercial space, public space, manufacturing premises, many residential houses. This is being examined, and I think that this initiative will eventually have a logical outcome and we will have a bill.”
For his part, Rustam Badasian, Pashinian’s former personal lawyer currently heading the State Revenue Committee, backed the idea of collecting a 20 percent value-added tax from candles sold to and lit by worshippers in just about every church in Armenia. Candle sales are a major source of revenue for the 1,700-year-old religious institution which suffered serious human and material losses in Soviet times.
Vartanian claimed that the plans for the new taxes are not connected with recent political developments. However, both Pashinian and Simonian signaled them in the context of their strong criticism of the Galstanian-led protests.
Artsvik Minasian, an opposition lawmaker involved in the protests, denounced the government plans. He pointed to an article of the Armenian constitution that acknowledges the ancient church’s “exceptional role” in the country’s history and social life.
There was no immediate reaction from the church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin, a historic town 20 kilometers west of Yerevan. Responding to Simonian last week, Archbishop Galstanian argued that the church never requested or received any government compensation for the Soviet-era destruction or confiscation of most of its worship sites and other property.
The Apostolic Church was established in 301 A.D. when Armenia became the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion. The vast majority of Armenian believers still belong to it.
Pashinian’s relationship with the church and its supreme head, Catholicos Garegin II, in particular has steadily deteriorated during his six-year rule. Tensions between them rose further last October when Garegin blamed Pashinian for Azerbaijan’s recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh and the resulting mass exodus of the region’s ethnic Armenian population.
They were underscored on Tuesday by an unprecedented incident at the Sardarapat war memorial that marred celebrations of the 106th anniversary of the establishment of the first Armenian republic. Police tried to physically stop Garegin from visiting the memorial just before a delayed official ceremony led by Pashinian. The Catholicos and other clergymen accompanying had to break through police cordons to lay flowers there.