Mesrob Ashjian, 62; Led Armenian Church in Eastern U.S.

Archbishop Mesrob Ashjian, a longtime leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church of the Eastern United States and Canada, has died. He was 62.

The archbishop, who served his church in the United States for almost two decades until his retirement in 1998, died of a heart attack Tuesday at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, church officials said.

At the time of his death, he was visiting New York City from his home in Armenia to attend a fund-raiser.

Born in Beirut, the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church in exile, he graduated from seminary and was ordained a celibate priest in 1961. He later studied in Switzerland and the United States before receiving the rank of Archimandrite in 1963. Through the rest of the 1960s, he worked in education and lectured in Lebanon and Syria.

He returned to the United States in 1970, studying theology, church history and liturgics at Princeton, where he earned two master’s degrees.

He published several dozen books in English and Armenian.

He served as prelate of the U.S. Eastern Prelacy from 1978 to 1998, when he was succeeded by Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan. The U.S. Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church is based in New York City, representing about 700,000 Christian faithful. An additional 800,000 are on the West Coast, with their headquarters in Los Angeles.

After his retirement, Ashjian moved from New York to Armenia in 1998 to care for the elderly and for children orphaned during the war with Azerbaijan in the 1990s. Ashjian baptized more than 10,000 children in Armenia after the former Soviet republic declared its independence. He also helped revive monasteries and churches banned for decades under Communist rule.

His funeral is to be held Monday at St. Illuminator’s Cathedral in Manhattan, and he is to be buried in Antelias, a Lebanese town that his church considers a holy site. Armenian Christians fled there under the Ottoman Empire.