Armenia`s first president  considers Pashinyan`s attacks on  Church  to be  external order

ArmInfo.  Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the  first president of Armenia, believes that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is fulfilling an external order by launching a campaign against the Armenian Apostolic Church,.

The politician stated that with the restoration of statehood, the  church, was actually freed from the obligation to replace secular  authorities. However, in his opinion, as long as a significant part  of Armenians live outside of Armenia, the church will continue to  maintain its unifying national role between the homeland and the  Diaspora.

"Not to mention the fact that the church plays an equally important  role in the spiritual and moral education of the nation,"  Ter-Petrosyan's Facebook post says.  The first president of Armenia  also noted that the Armenian Church, with its 1,700-year history, had  a notable feature: almost without exception, it elevated the most  worthy cleric of its time to the throne of the Catholicos. "If there  were contradictions in the election of the Catholicos at times, then  this was more due to foreign interference than internal  disagreements," Ter-Petrosyan stated.