“Pope Francis, who visited Turkey last year, would have been perfectly conscious that he would offend the moderate Muslim country by his use of the word “genocide,” writes BBC reporter David Willey, commenting on the declaration by Pope Francis at the Mass held on Sunday in the Vatican, during which he acknowledged the Armenian Genocide.

“But the Pope’s powerful phrase “concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to bleed without bandaging it” extended his condemnation to all other, more recent, mass killings.

It now remains to be seen how far his remarks will impact upon the Vatican’s future relations with moderate Muslim states. It was a bold decision but totally coherent with Pope Francis’ philosophy of open discussion about moral arguments.

Pope Francis’ focus today on Armenia, the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion, even before the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine, serves as yet another reminder of the Catholic Church’s widely spread roots in Eastern Europe and the Middle East,” the author says.

As reported earlier, during the Mass on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Pope Francis said that humanity had lived through “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the last century. “The first, which is widely considered ‘the first genocide of the 20th Century’, struck your own Armenian people.”