The spokesman for the Catholic bishops’ conference of Turkey has emphatically denied that he suggested Vatican archives would show that Turkey was innocent of genocide against the Armenian people.

Rinaldo Marmara, the bishops’ spokesman, had been quoted in a Turkish daily, Vatan, as saying that internal “Armenian problems”—rather than deliberate Turkish policies—were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915. Marmara charged that the quotations attributed to him were taken out of context by “journalists to search for provocation.”

In fact, Marmara said, the Vatican archives contain a rich deposit of documents regarding the history of Turkey. “There are of course also some on the Armenian issue,” he said, but he noted that these resources are available to all qualified scholars, and he did not intend to comment on the lessons to be drawn from them. “I just point out the relevance of these archives,” he said.

CatholicCulture.org; December 18, 2012