MECHITAR VARTAPET, Abbot. - Hieromonk, in the world Peter Manuk, founder of the Armenian Monks of St. Anthony Abbot, called Mechitarists, b. at Sebaste (Sivas) in Lesser Armenia on 7 Feb. 1676, d. at Venice on 27 Apr. 1749. At the age of 15 he entered the Sourp-Nishan, an Armenian monastery of his city, taking the name M. (consoler).
The Armenian monasteries of the time were not equal to their mission. At sixteen M. went to the patriarchal monastery of Etchmiadzin (Caucasus), to follow the Catholic archbishop Michael, renowned for his erudition. He was disappointed in him and therefore decided to renounce the teachers of his homeland, in order to move to Rome (1695), although he had been dissuaded from it, at Aleppo, by the Jesuit Father A. Beauvollier, who found M. very learned in the knowledge of the Armenian Fathers and in the refutation of heretics. He did not, however, give up the journey he had undertaken except at Cyprus, on account of a sudden illness contracted there: he returned to his native city.
In the spring of 1696 M. was ordained a priest. Full of zeal and conscious of the urgent religious, cultural and social needs of his people, he dreamed of an Order of hieromonk-vartapets, learned and magnanimous preachers, after the manner of the European regular missionaries whom he had come to know in the Levant. Then (1696-1700) he undertook a series of daring journeys between Constantinople and the Caucasus, in search of a suitable place and of some prelate or vartapet patron in support of his ideal. This attempt having failed, and while Avetik was unleashing at Constantinople the first persecutions against the Catholics and their leaders, including M., the latter, on 8 Sept. 1701, founded his Institute in the convent of the French Capuchins of St. Louis, his inviolable refuge.
On the suggestions of the ambassador of Venice at Constantinople, M. with his disciples set out toward the Morea (Peloponnese), a Venetian domain since 1687, where he arrived at the beginning of 1703; and having settled at Modon, in a few years he built a magnificent monastery, and laid the foundations of a church (1708). With two letters dated 16 June 1705, addressed one to Pope Clement XI and the other to Cardinal Fabroni, prefect of Propaganda, M. put forward the request for the approval of the Institute, as a reformed Armenian monastic Order of St. Anthony Abbot. Propaganda approved its Constitutions, somewhat reworked, ad experimentum (1711).
The work, barely transplanted to Modon, was soon shattered by the Turco-Venetian war, which ended with the passing of the Peloponnese to the Turks (1715). M. and a few disciples, stripped of everything, were cast upon the shores of the Venetian lagoon, where they asked for asylum and protection, and where the islet of St. Lazarus was granted them, by means of a symbolic rent (26 Aug. 1717).
A larger and finer monastery with church and library, completed under the guidance of M. in 1740, now offered a worthy seat to his work which, through an intense missionary, literary and educational activity, became the center of the religious and cultural radiation of the Armenian people. Indeed, during the fifty years of his activity, M. incessantly promoted the apostolate among the Armenians at Constantinople, in the inland cities of Armenia, in Transylvania, at Belgrade. His work, initially hindered, was made more expeditious by a decree of Propaganda (26 Sept. 1718), personally obtained by him, which granted M. and his successors the faculty of sending their own missionaries into the Levant. This decree, together with the fourth vow of the Missions, prescribed by the Constitutions, constitutes the canonical basis of the Mechitarist missions.
To his missionary activity M. added intellectual activity through the Catholic press. He himself reprinted books of piety and religion and composed others. About fifty works published through his efforts are counted, among which first the Imitation (Constantinople 1700), the Book of the virtues and vices of P. d'Aragona, the Paradise of the soul of Albert the Great, the Exercises of perfection of A. Rodriguez, the Compendium Theologicae Veritatis attributed to St. Albert the Great, and many others of ascetic content. He compiled and published the Armenian Grammar, a commentary on Ecclesiastes, and on St. Matthew, a voluminous work; an Armenian Dictionary, the first of its kind; and many other commentaries. M., admired by his countrymen and by foreigners (he has been called a second "Illuminator"), was buried in the abbey church at St. Lazarus. The first proceedings for the cause of beatification have been begun.
Bibliography4 works
Garabed Amaduni