The prime minister of Armenia has vowed to prove his faith by dropping his trousers to the head of the church.
Nikol Pashinyan was challenged to ‘prove’ his member is uncircumcised in a bitter feud played out over social media.
An Armenian priest accused Pashinyan of being snipped on Monday, implying he was not Christian in the deeply religious west Asian country.
The priest, Father Zareh Ashuryan, said: ‘I believe that our Apostolic Holy Church must immediately cleanse itself of those false “believers” who are traitors to the nation, have dishonoured the memory of their ancestors, broken the vow of baptism, and replaced the seal of the Holy Cross with the sign of circumcision’.
This enraged the country’s leader, who shot back with a fiery Facebook post on Tuesday, suggesting he’d be willing to show his penis to the Church’s supreme leader Karekin II.
He addressed Karekin II by his birth name Ktrij Nersisyan, saying he was ‘ready to accept Ktrij Nersisyan and his spokesperson [father Ashuryan] and prove the opposite’ about being circumcised.
Pashinyan also shot back at the church’s leader, asking: ‘And let him finally answer the question of whether he has broken his vow of celibacy or not. Does he have a child or not?’
The extraordinary war of words comes as tensions rocket between Armenia’s PM and the powerful clergy.
In late May, Pashinyan claimed that churches had become ‘storerooms’ and that priests were breaking their celibacy vows, according to OC Media.
The Armenian Church responded, saying Pashinyan’s language was ‘unbecoming of a statesman’.
They added: ‘Political motives drive this anti-Church and represent an attempt to erode the standing of the Armenian Church and its clergy.’
On Wednesday, Pashinyan posted saying law enforcement had prevented a large and sinister plan by the ‘criminal oligarchic clergy’ to ‘destabilise the Republic’.
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Pashinyan has been Prime Minister of Armenia since 2018 as head of the Civil Contract party.
The party gained over 50% of the vote in 2021 election but faced allegations of fraud from the opposition.
Karekin II served as a bishop and Archbishop before being elected the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church since 1999.
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