Meeting in the Vatican today with the leader of the Armenian Orthodox and Apostolic Church, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the “heavy persecutions suffered by Armenian Christians, above all in the last century,” an apparent reference to the mass killings of Armenians by Turks around the time of World War I.

Especially given past tensions in Benedict’s relationship with Turkey (which he once opposed for membership in the European Union), a more explicit statement would no doubt have prompted strong words from Ankara.

In his own remarks, the Armenian Patriarch did refer to the “genocide committed against the Armenian people by the Ottomans.”