by David Bishop
This week, the Vatican signed multiple new agreements with Azerbaijan. This is part of a pattern that has developed throughout 2025 of agreements between Azerbaijan, which has ethnically cleansed some of the most ancient Christian communities in the world, and the Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian church in the world.
One of the latest agreements between the Vatican and Azerbaijan entails medical and training cooperation between Azerbaijan and the Bambinu Gesu Children’s Hospital, a specialized pediatric hospital in Rome under the administration of the Vatican. Though children’s hospitals may seem uncontroversial, an additional agreement was signed between Azerbaijan and the Vatican Apostolic Library and Archives. This agreement, signed by the Heyday Aliyev Foundation representing Azerbaijan, would entail Azeri historians and researchers cooperating with the Vatican Library and Archives to conduct research on the history of Christianity in the Caucasus.
It would seem obvious why such an agreement is highly questionable and has generated controversy and displeasure in Armenia. The history of Christians in the Caucasus, which dates back to ancient times, is exactly what Azerbaijan and their Turkish allies have consistently sought to destroy. Vast ancient Eastern Christian communities, ranging from the Assyrian Church of the East to the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, but most of all the Armenian Apostolic Church, were nearly completely wiped out in Turkey and Azerbaijan in the twentieth century. This tradition continues even into the 2020s, with the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh and the destruction of its ancient Armenian Christian heritage. Yet such an agreement grants Azerbaijan, notorious for wildly propagandistic rewritings of Christian history, a position of influence with the Vatican Archives’ Caucasus historical department.
Furthermore, this is not the first instance of Vatican-Azeri cooperation in 2025. Azerbaijan seems strangely interested in work with the Vatican this year, as they have held signing ceremonies for various agreements no less than three times this year now. In July, Azeri representatives were welcomed to the Vatican for the signing of a memorandum on “inter-faith dialogue” between Catholics and Muslims in Azerbaijan. Before that, in April, the Vatican hosted a conference with Azeri representatives called “Christianity in Azerbaijan: History and Modernity”, in which Azeri propaganda narratives about the history of Christians in territories controlled by Azerbaijan (including Artsakh), were essentially accepted by the Vatican without criticism. Obviously false Azeri narratives include a claim that ancient Christian churches in Artsakh were in fact built by Caucasian Albanians, a predecessor group to Azeris, and not by Armenians. This is an obvious attempt to remove the presence of Armenians from the history of the region. Thankfully, this propaganda conference at the Vatican was at least subsequently condemned in a letter signed by over 350 historians and scholars from around the world for “deliberate acts of historical aggression”.
It should be noted that the new Roman Catholic Pope Leo XIV has enthusiastically welcomed the Trump peace initiative between Armenia and Azerbaijan, despite Armenian opposition.
