Greeting of His Holiness, Aram I, Catholicos of Cilicia of the Armenians

(26 Nov 08 - RV) His Holiness, Aram I, Catholicos of Cilicia of the Armenians greeted Pope Benedict XVI during the weekly General Audience Wednesday morning. Below is the transcript and audio of His Holiness' remarks...

Your Holiness, it gives me a profound spiritual joy to greet you once again in the spirit of Christian love and fellowship. I would like also to greet the faithful of the Church of God who have come here from different parts of the world to get the blessing of Your Holiness.

This Saturday the Armenian Church is going to celebrate its Founders. As Saint Peter and Saint Paul are the Founders of the Church of Rome, Saints Thadddaeus and Bartholomew, the disciples of Christ are Founders of the Armenian Church. Our two Churches have Apostolic origin, but for centuries for our Churches, the apostolicity has never been a sheer ideological legacy but a source of witness and evangelism of diakonia and mission.

The world of today in which we are experiencing the decay of moral values, the marginalization of spiritual values and Tradition I believe that we should translate the apostolic origin of our Churches to apostolic vocation.

And I greet the See of Your Holiness to involve the Churches in this period of time where we are faced with tremendous problems and crises in a process of re-evangelization.
I believe that we need re-evangelization of our Christian communities, our families, our communities, this is a top priority, an evangelistic priority to our churches.

Therefore, Your Holiness I would like to associate myself with the missionary and evangelistic work of Your Holiness and on this occasion I would like to make a special appeal to all the churches of the world to join their efforts in a common evangelism in Europe, in the Middle East and in different parts of the world.

Therefore, on this occasion, Your Holiness, I would like to extend to you my best wishes. May God strengthen you physically and spiritually to carry on your Pontifical mission in a world which is in dire need of spiritual transformation. And may God Bless you all.