BY  :  Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter

WASHINGTON — Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan considers it a “great privilege” to face incarceration amid the ongoing prosecution of Armenian Apostolic Church leaders and escalating tension with the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, an advocate has said.

“In a small, plain prison meeting room, the gray-bearded, lively-eyed, and cassocked archbishop cut a larger-than-life figure,” Christian Solidarity International President John Eibner said of Galstanyan during a Thursday briefing organized by the opposition coalition National Democratic Alliance on Capitol Hill.

Eibner recounted his visit with the archbishop, who has been imprisoned since June on what the advocate calls “trumped-up charges” of “terrorism” and “conspiracy to overthrow the government.” The meeting, which also included one of Eibner’s colleagues, was organized by a team of pro bono lawyers at the Armenian Center for Political Rights.

“[Galstanyan] assured us it was a great privilege to be incarcerated because of his efforts to be faithful to Christ, faithful to his church, and faithful to his nation, especially at a time when that Christian nation and its civilization faces an existential threat,” Eibner said.

The event focused on Pashinyan’s ongoing crackdown on top leaders within the Armenian Apostolic Church, one of the world’s oldest national churches, as well as the aftermath of Vice President JD Vance’s historic visit to Armenia.

Galstanyan, who headed the Tavush for the Motherland movement, suspended his priesthood in 2024 and announced plans to run for prime minister. He headed the Tavush Diocese in Armenia’s northeast, which opposed land concessions to Azerbaijan, and led a protest movement against Pashinyan.

“Archbishop Bagrat believes it providential that he should now be an inmate in Kentron Prison, where the Armenian KGB executed his episcopal namesake and role model during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937,” Eibner said. “That was Archbishop Bagrat Vardazarian. This martyr of the Church had also been falsely charged with plotting to overthrow the government.”

The Armenian Apostolic Church dates back to the early fourth century and serves “as the most solid institutional bastion of Armenian nationhood and of Christian witness among Armenians,” Eibner said. Armenia’s national church has survived the “violent efforts of the atheistic Soviet authorities to eradicate [it],” he said. It has also survived the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915 as well as the ethno-religious cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, known affectionately to Armenians as Artsakh.

“Because of the spiritual and institutional strength of the Armenian Apostolic Church, it has not been enough for Pashinyan to imprison only Archbishop Bagrat,” the CSI president said during the briefing. “He was the first of more than a dozen prominent clerics who have been placed behind bars, consigned to house arrest, or indicted on a slew of unsubstantiated charges — including terrorism, coup plotting, obstruction of justice, and even planting drugs.”

In May 2025, Pashinyan made a series of critical statements against the head of the worldwide Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Karekin II, and called for his forced removal. Following the verbal attacks, the prime minister began arresting and imprisoning high-ranking archbishops and clergy members.

Eibner contends that the charges against Armenian church leaders are part of a movement to adhere to Pashinyan’s “Real Armenia” ideology. Pashinyan’s ideology, he contends, calls for “seizing control of the Armenian Apostolic Church and transforming it into a servant of the state.”

“Archbishop Bagrat has long seen the ‘Ideology of Real Armenia’ as nothing more than appeasement in the hope of satisfying Turkey’s and Azerbaijan’s harsh conditions for accepting Pashinyan’s submission to their authority,” Eibner stated.

“Should the ‘Real Armenia’ project continue unchecked, it is not only conceivable but is very likely that within a generation Armenian Christians will be a minority in Armenia, without political agency, living mainly in a diminishing Armenian quarter in Yerevan, much like one finds today in Aleppo or in Jerusalem,” he added.

Eibner recounted each of the actions that the archbishop recommended that the Trump administration take to achieve “genuine and lasting peace” in Armenia by securing the following: “the release of the Armenian Christian prisoners held in Baku, as already called for by President Trump,” “the release of the church-related prisoners held in Yerevan,” and “guarantees for the safe return, with fundamental human rights intact, of the 150,000 Armenian Christians who were forced out of their homes in Nagorno Karabakh.”

During his visit to Armenia, Eibner noted that Vance endorsed Pashinyan’s re-election campaign and later deleted a tweet referencing the Armenian Genocide. Following the vice president’s visit, Armenian prosecutors pressed criminal charges against the Catholicos and placed a travel ban on him and six other bishops after a pro-Pashinyan cleric was excommunicated.

“Wittingly or unwittingly, Vance’s visit has effectively given the greenlight for the continuation of the persecution of the Armenian Apostolic Church,” Eibner asserts, calling on the Trump administration to “show strength and conviction by defending the Armenian Apostolic Church.”

In addition to Eibner, Ambassador Alberto Fernandez of the Middle East Media Research Institute and former European Union special envoy Ján Figel’ also spoke at the briefing.

Fernandez told attendees that there “is a clear, direct connection between the freedom given to the Church or to religious bodies and other freedoms of speech and conscience.”

“I don’t know of any situation where a regime persecutes religious bodies and then turns around and is open and accepting of secular criticism, political criticism, sarcasm, any other kind of stuff,” the MEMRI vice president warned.

“Regimes that don’t want to hear criticism from religious authorities tend also not to want to hear criticism from the media or from secular critics,” he added.

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