John Allen’s interview with the Armenian Patriarch

Though Benedict indeed spared no effort to send positive signals to the Turks, his more immediate sensitivity in his meeting with the Armenians was actually for someone else – the Armenians themselves, and especially their leader, Patriarch Mesrob II.

“It would have been a huge headache for us,” Mesrob II told NCR in Istanbul shortly after his meeting with the pope, referring to the prospect of Benedict XVI inflaming Turkish sentiment by using the term “genocide.”

Mesrob said doing so would have thrown his community of perhaps 60,000, the largest Christian community in Turkey but still a tiny minority in a nation of some 72 million, into tumult, potentially making them targets for a nationalist backlash.

Benedict XVI could have gone home after setting off such a rhetorical bomb, Mesrob II suggested, but the Armenians would have been left behind to deal with the aftermath.

There has been conversation about this, as with other matters, and with all of it, I think it’s safe to assume that on a minefield-laced trip like this, very little is left to chance. If the Pope is going to speak in the presence of the Armenian Christians in Turkey, I think we can guess that His People ran things by Their People, to the effect of "Tell us how to refer to this in the way that will help you the most."  The interview confirms this:

In the event, neither Mesrob for Benedict used the word “genocide” or its Armenian equivalent, Metz Yeghern, meaning roughly “malice.” Mesrob said he called Vatican officials prior to the pope’s visit, and both sides agreed to use only indirect language.

Allen also pulls together all of Benedict’s references to religious freedom in his statements in Turkey.