Black Beret special police units have again entered the grounds of the Mother See Etchmiadzin while the Supreme Spiritual Council is in session. The timing of today’s intrusion is no coincidence. It comes immediately after Pashinyan’s meeting with eight clergymen who have broken from the church and aligned themselves with his effort to weaken its leadership.

Pashinyan’s push to bring the church under state control has been escalating for months. More than two dozen individuals are now in jail for defending the institution, including businessman Samvel Karapetyan and several senior clergy. These prosecutions are widely viewed as politically motivated attempts to intimidate and silence church-backed opposition. It is also not the first time state forces have entered Etchmiadzin. In June, masked NSS officers stormed the same grounds while attempting to arrest Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan.

At the heart of this conflict lies the church’s consistent and outspoken criticism of Pashinyan’s governance. In response, he has demanded the resignation of the Catholicos and attempted to justify this pressure through unverified allegations, including claims of violated celibacy vows and a secret child. None of these accusations have been supported by credible evidence, and many regard them as attempts to discredit the church’s moral authority and create a pretext for state intervention.

At the same time, Pashinyan has been working to elevate breakaway clergy. His recent attendance at a liturgy conducted by a defrocked priest at Hovhannavank, a service the church declared illegal, was widely interpreted as a political gesture designed to empower loyalists and weaken the church’s canonical hierarchy.

Today’s arrival of Black Berets at Etchmiadzin pushes the crisis into a new and dangerous phase. The combination of police activity on sacred grounds, politically charged arrests, public attacks on the Catholicos, and efforts to legitimize defrocked clergy points to what many now see as a coordinated campaign to undermine the independence of the Armenian Church.