Blessed Gomidas Keumurdjian

Gomidas Keumurdjian (Armenian: Կոմիտաս Քէօմիւրճեան; 1656 – 5 November 1707), known as Cosma de Carbognano, was a married priest of the Armenian Apostolic Church and later a convert to the Armenian Catholic Church. At the insistence of the Armenian Apostolic Patriarch of Constantinople, Ter Gomidas was tried before an Islamic court and sentenced to death by the Qadi for treason against the Ottoman Sultan and for secretly baptizing Muslims. Gomidas, however, was offered a full pardon and his immediate release in return for his conversion to Islam, but he repeatedly refused and was publicly executed by beheading in the Samatya quarter of Istanbul. He is regarded by the Catholic Church as a martyr and has been venerated as a Blessed since 1929. Gomidas Keumurdjian was born in Constantinople, the son of an Armenian priest. He studied under a learned Vardapet and, before being ordained a Deacon, was married at about the age of twenty and eventually fathered seven children. Like his father, he too became a parish priest of the Armenian Apostolic Church and was stationed at the Church of St. George in Galata. His preaching attracted large audiences of not only Armenians, but also Ottoman Greeks and so many Muslims that Ter Gomidas had to regularly preach sermons in the Turkish language. He was also an author of Christian poetry and composed a verse paraphrase of the Acts of the Apostles. There was, with the encouragement of French Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries, a movement within the various Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches that favored reunion with Rome. Aided considerably by the extremely high level of education, rooted in both Medieval Scholasticism and Renaissance humanism that had been demanded before the ordination of Catholic priests after the Counter-Reformation, this movement was extremely successful. So many Eastern Christians were being won over to the Eastern Catholic Churches in Istanbul alone that Dr.