Pope Francis has expressed willingness to visit Armenia in 2015 to attend events dated to the Genocide 100th anniversary.

In May 2013, Pope Francis referred to the mass murder of Armenians as “the first genocide of the 20th century.” He alluded briefly to the Armenian Genocide during a meeting with Armenian Catholic Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni of Cilicia.

Several years earlier, while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio described the killing and forced deportation of millions of Armenians as “the gravest crime of Ottoman Turkey against the Armenian people and all of humanity.”