This resolution unanimously passed, as amended, at the September 27, 2007 meeting of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Council of Churches.
The Massachusetts Council of Churches unequivocally recognizes the Armenian Genocide, launched on April 24, 1915, and continued through 1923, which resulted in the annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and the deportation of almost the entire Armenian population from its ancestral lands in Asia Minor. The Armenian Genocide marked the first modern instance of genocide conducted as a policy of state. The arrest and execution of leaders and intellectuals, forced death marches, rape and enslavement, and the incitement of ethnic and religious hatred among the majority population became a model for subsequent genocides, such as under the Nazi regime, in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and Rwanda and Darfur. The Massachusetts Council of Churches joins with ecumenical partners in the National Council of Churches[1] and the World Council of Churches[2] to unequivocally recognize the Armenian Genocide and work together against all genocide denial, wherever and whenever it occurs.
Therefore, the Massachusetts Council of Churches, hearing the cry for truth and justice, calls on the government of the United States of America to enact legislation granting official recognition of the Armenian Genocide. The silence our own government has been a source of anguish to Armenian-Americans, the Armenian churches and people of good conscience.
The Massachusetts Council of Churches resolves…
To resist and rebuke the deniers of genocide (whether these are criminally complicit; politically expedient; purveyors of pseudo-scholarship; or merely apathetic) in the certain knowledge that any denial of genocide will only encourage attempts of genocide in the future;
To remember the souls of those who perished in the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, and pray for the peace of those who survived; and to pray, most emphatically, that in the century just beginning, God will free humankind of the scourge of genocide once and for all;
To ask the member communions of the Massachusetts Council of Churches and their respective faithful to remember the peoples of the first Christian nation and to offer prayers alongside the faithful of the Diocese of the Armenian Church in America (Eastern), a member of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, in a spirit of ecumenical fellowship and out of our common moral vision of bearing witness to human suffering, as exemplified in the life, sacrifice, and victory of our Risen Lord, Jesus Christ.