In 1915 Pope Benedict XV wrote to Mehmed V, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire, saying that he could hear "the echo of the groans of an entire people... subjected to unspeakable sufferings". When the two leaders' modern-day counterparts met last November at the Turkish presidential palace outside Ankara, those echoes were still audible. According to a new book by Franca Gian-soldati, the Vatican-watcher of Il Messaggero, an Italian daily, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president, "begged" Pope Francis to refrain from openly characterising the Ottoman empire's slaughter of Armenians in 1915 as genocide. The pope respected his host's wishes then. But on April 12th he abandoned tact and referred to the killings as "the first genocide of the 20th century". The Turkish government responded with outrage and recalled its ambassador to the Holy See for consultations. A vote in the European Parliament on April 15th, commending the pope's statement and urging Turkey to recognise the massacres as genocide, further infuriated Mr Erdogan. "It is not possible for Turkey to accept such a crime, such a sin," he said.
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