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Pope Francis has used the word "genocide" to describe mass killing of Armenians under Ottoman rule in WW1 100 years ago, at a Vatican church service, the BBC writes.

The Pope first used the word genocide for the killings two years ago, prompting a fierce protest from Turkey.

At Sunday's Mass in the Armenian Catholic rite at Peter's Basilica, he said that humanity had lived through "three massive and unprecedented tragedies" in the last century.

"The first, which is widely considered 'the first genocide of the 20th Century', struck your own Armenian people," he said, in a form of words used by a declaration by Pope John Paul II in 2001.

The Pope was perfectly conscious that by using the word "genocide" he would offend Turkey, which considers the number of deaths of Armenians during the extinction of the Ottoman Empire exaggerated, and continues to deny the extent of the massacre, the BBC writes.

But the Pope's powerful phrase "concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to bleed without bandaging it" extended his condemnation to all other, more recent, mass killings, including those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia and today's massacres by Islamic State, the news outlet notes.