Armenian leaders pan Vatican-Azeri funding ‘friendship’

Is money from Azerbaijan shaping the Vatican's approach to Central Asia?

An Armenian Orthodox bishop has said that a shift in the Vatican’s approach to the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is influenced by Azerbaijan’s funding of Vatican projects, which are seemingly part of the country’s “caviar diplomacy” strategy.

Anar Alakbarov, assistant to the president of Azerbaijan, and executive director of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, met with Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, Prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, in Nov. 2024. Credit: Heydar Aliyev Foundation.

The bishop’s remarks came amid public pushback over a conference on Christianity in Azerbaijan held at the Gregorian University this month, which Armenian activists and church officials say is part of an Azeri effort to erase Armenian history.

—
Orthodox Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, ecumenical director of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America, told The Pillar this week that he believes financial ties to the Azeri government have influenced Vatican diplomacy.

“There’s a lot of people and a lot of media articles asking why the Vatican is forgetting their friends in Armenia, and it is because there are cardinals and Vatican officials in touch with Azerbaijan, and getting money from them,” Aykazian told The Pillar this week.

“These kind of events are allowed because of money, the Vatican has been receiving money from Azerbaijan for some time — the main example being the restoration of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, which was funded by Azerbaijan,” added Aykazian, who also serves as vice-moderator of the World Council of Churches, a global ecumenical initiative which both includes Orthodox and Protestant hierarchies representing 352 member organizations.

Aykazian’s comments followed growing backlash to an April 10 conference held at the Pontifical Gregorian University, titled “Christianity in Azerbaijan: History and Modernity.”

Armenian activists and Church leaders have called the event part of a broader campaign to erase Armenian Christian heritage from disputed territories between both countries.

Promotional materials of the conference included distinctly Azeri reads on West Asian history.

A display of the medieval Armenian monastery of Dadivank, including the claim that it belonged to the “Caucasian Albanian” culture, an Azeri government claim widely disputed by historians.

“This has no basis in reality. They say these are Caucasian Albanian churches, but Caucasian Albanians disappeared in the 8th century,” Aykazian added.

Dan Harre, deputy director of the Save Armenia NGO, believes that the narratives presented at the conference are part of a broad Azeri campaign to whitewash a modern conflict, which Harre said is the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Azeri-occupied territories.

“Azerbaijan and Turkey are very bullish on seizing as much Armenian territory as they can because they want to establish a pan-Turkic corridor that runs from Istanbul all the way into Central Asia. The one thing that stands in the way is Armenia,” Harre told The Pillar.

“Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in conflict with one another over territory since the Soviet Union dissolved. A couple of years ago, Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed this region of Nagorno-Karabakh, leading to the exodus of 120,000 Christians from the region. It’s the first time Christians haven’t lived in those mountains in almost 2000 years, and the first time Armenians haven’t lived in the region for 3000 years,” Harre added.

Azerbaijan is a majority Muslim country of around 10 million people. It is three times larger than its neighbor, the mostly Christian Armenia, which has a population of fewer than three million.

Fighting has broken out periodically since 1998 over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is situated within Azerbaijan but populated by ethnic Armenians. The area was home to a breakaway state known as the Republic of Artsakh, which was closely tied to Armenia. The Republic of Artsakh dissolved after a 2023 Azeri offensive.

Hundreds of soldiers were killed in the 2023 offensive, which ended with an uneasy ceasefire and with 120,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing the region.

Historically, Armenia has deep Christian roots — in 301, the Kingdom of Armenia was the first country to become an officially Christian nation.

“The Gospel was brought to Armenia by Thaddeus and Bartholomew to Armenia almost 2000 years ago, the Ottomans slaughtered 1.5 million Armenian Christians, so they’ve given more martyrs to the Church than any other country. The Church is what actually has held Armenia together over the centuries despite relentless persecution,” Harre explained.

But in his view: “Turkey and Azerbaijan want to seize Armenian land for geopolitical purposes, but [Armenians’] religious identity [also] makes them a target. In [Azeri] minds, the genocide 100 years ago is unfinished business. When you look at the ethnically cleansed land two years ago, one of the first things they did was to destroy churches, sand blast inscriptions, and desecrate Christian cemeteries,” he added.

In some instances, Azerbaijan authorities have not destroyed churches but used them for revisionist purposes, Harre claimed.

“They also removed inscriptions and put different ones that claimed that it was a Caucasian Albanian church. This is part of a larger revisionist strategy by Azerbaijan to say that the Caucasian Albanian people are actually the indigenous Christians in the region to claim that Armenians don't have a right to any of it because they aren't the historical Christian population there.”

While the conference talks were not published or streamed, a published summary of one talk claimed that Albanians destroyed Caucasian Albanian monuments in the disputed Karabakh region to “falsely present them as Armenian,” and charged that Armenians are “aggressive settlers” in the region, and that Yerevan, Armenia’s capital is Azeri.

—
For its part, the Gregorian University responded to the controversy by saying it had no involvement in planning the event, explaining that the university’s only connection was renting a space for the conference.

But Armenians say ecclesiastical officers gave the conference its support.

Indeed, Cardinals Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches and former apostolic nuncio to Armenia and Azerbaijan, and George Jacob Koovakad, prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, sent letters of congratulations to the event and Bishop Vladimir Fekete, apostolic prefect of the Catholic Church in Azerbaijan, was one of its speakers.

And this is not the first time the Vatican has become embroiled in a scandal connected to Azerbaijan.

In August 2024, L’Observatore Romano published an article that repeatedly describes traditionally Armenian regions, churches, and monasteries as “Caucasian Albanian.”

“The article denied the fact that there were any Armenian churches in Karabakh, which is simply a lie. Armenians, including Armenian Catholics, got furious, but things haven’t changed,” Bishop Aykazian told The Pillar.

Months before the 2020 offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva was awarded the Order of Pope Pius IX at the Vatican.

Ilqar Mukhtarov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the Holy See, received the same distinction on April 3.

But the link between the Vatican and Azerbaijan, an autocratic regime accused of ethnically cleansing Armenians in its territory and threatening the very existence of Armenia, runs deeper.

And critics say that Azerbaijan dollars flow to the Vatican as a way of garnering papal support, and “Church-washing” Azeri activity in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Heydar Aliyev Foundation, run by Azerbaijan’s first lady and the president’s top political aide, is considered the “caviar diplomacy” arm of Azerbaijan, and lists the Vatican Apostolic Library and the Vatican Museums among its “partners.”

The foundation’s website lists a number of restoration projects in the Vatican funded by the Azeri foundation.

The list includes the Roman catacombs of Saint Marcellinus and Peter, Saint Commodilla, and Saint Sebastian, the restoration of a statue of Zeus in the Vatican Museums, restoration and translation of over 3,000 books and 75 manuscripts in the Vatican Apostolic Library, the restoration of a bas-relief with the encounter between Pope Leo the Great and Attilla in Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the restoration of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls.

The foundation also took part in the restorations of churches in France, including the Notre Dame Cathedral of Strasbourg, and the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital.

According to Italian outlet Irpi Media, the donations amounted to 640,000 euros.

But an Azeri official said publicly in 2020 that the number was “over 1 million euros,” and many of the restoration works came after 2020, suggesting even more investment in the Church by Azeri sources.

One of the largest restoration projects came in 2024, when the Vatican City State Governorate announced an agreement between the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls and the Heydar Aliyev Foundation.

The governorate said the foundation would fund “the restoration works to secure the marble decorations … The various cracks in the foundations cause malformations that extend to the marble cladding, resulting in cracks and crevices and the detachment of the marble from the wall.”

“The agreement is a confirmation of the sincere friendship and mutual cooperation that exists between the Governorate and Azerbaijan,” the statement added.

In a December 2021 conference, foundation officials claimed that the experience gained from preserving historical monuments in the Vatican is “now applied on the territories of Azerbaijan liberated from the occupation” — namely, the territories in dispute with Armenia, which were forcibly taken in the 2023 offensive.

Critics say the links between the Vatican and the former Soviet republic began with Cardinal Gugerotti, who is now the prefect of the Dicastery for Eastern Catholic Churches.

“Cardinal Gugerotti is behind this, he is telling everyone he’s the best friend of the Azeri,” Aykazian told The Pillar.

Gugerotti was the apostolic nuncio to Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia from 2001 to 2011.

The Vatican and Azerbaijan signed an agreement negotiated by Gugerotti regulating their diplomatic relations in 2011, and Azerbaijan then appointed an ambassador to the Holy See.

During Gugerotti’s service as nuncio, Azeri authorities began having frequent meetings, both in Azerbaijan and the Vatican, with Vatican officials, among them then-secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who then was the president of the Vatican Pontifical Council for Culture.

According to Irpi Media, Cardinal Ravasi is the other key link in the Azerbaijan-Vatican connections.

Ravasi opened the doors to the Azeri-funded restoration projects in the Vatican with a 2012 agreement to restore Roman catacombs, and another to translate and restore manuscripts in the Apostolic Library.

Cardinal Gugerotti did not respond to a request for comment. Cardinal Ravasi could not be reached for comment.

—
Despite the controversial links between many Vatican officials and Azerbaijan, many Armenians refuse to put the blame on Pope Francis.

“The pope is one of the best friends of the Armenian people. Argentina has one of the largest Armenian diasporas in the world, and he had great relationships with them and with the Armenian bishop in Buenos Aires, he loves Armenians,” Aykazian told The Pillar.

In fact, during his 2016 trip to Armenia, Pope Francis was the first pope to publicly call the 1915 Armenian Genocide as such, which led to Turkey briefly recalling its Vatican ambassador.

The pope has also met three times with Karekin II, Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and ecumenical relations are widely considered to be positive.

However, the event at the Gregorian University and the broader links between the Vatican and Azerbaijan also stand to threaten the ecumenical relations between the Catholic Church and the Armenian Apostolic Church.

“The pope doesn’t seem to have anything to say now because of how many groups are fighting each other within the Vatican,” Aykazian added.

The Council for the Armenian Community of Rome, Aram I of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia (An Armenian Apostolic autocephalus church), the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and Karekin II himself, all condemned the event, with Karekin II regretting that “such an anti-scholarly event was allowed to take place under the roof of a prominent Catholic educational institution.”

“On the one hand, we’re trying to work together, but on the other we’re receiving very bad news from the Vatican. There’s a lot of tension,” Aykazian concluded.