Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni (; born Pierre Taza; 17 January 1940 – 25 June 2015) was the patriarch of the Armenian Catholic Church from 1999 until his death in 2015.
Biography
Pierre Taza was the second son and the fifth of eight children born in Cairo to Elias Taza and Josephine Azouz. The couple were Armenian refugees from Ottoman Turkey who fled to Egypt in 1915 during the Armenian genocide. He completed his primary and secondary studies at the college of the Brothers of the Christian Schools (Frères des écoles chrétiennes) in Cairo.
Taza felt a vocation for the priesthood very early in life and thus was sent to the Armenian Leonine Pontifical College in Rome in 1958 where he studied Philosophy and Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. His Bishop, Raphaël Bayan ordained him a priest in Cairo on 15 August 1965.
He served the parish of the Armenian Catholic Cathedral of the Annunciation in Cairo from 1965 to 1968 with Fr John Kasparian, who in 1982 became head of the Armenian Catholic Church as Hovhannes Bedros XVIII. From 1968 to 1990, Taza was curate of the parish of St Therese of Heliopolis in Cairo.