Pope pleas for "diversity" during stopover in Budapest
Francis urges Hungary to be both "rooted" and "open" during a brief visit that included a meeting with Viktor Orbán, the country’s anti-immigrant prime minister
Pope Francis has challenged Catholics in Hungary to make a deeper commitment to following Jesus, saying it is not enough to just call oneself Catholic.
"Jesus unsettles us; he is not satisfied with declarations of faith, but asks us to purify our religiosity!" the pope said Sunday morning in Budapest while presiding at the closing Mass of the 52nd International Eucharistic Congress.
He urged a hushed crowd of some 100,000 people who gathered in a sunbaked Heroes Square not to reduce Christianity to "defending our image", but to allow Jesus to “heal us of our self-absorption” and “open our hearts to self-giving”.
The seven-hour stop in Budapest was the start of a three-and-a-half-day papal visit to Slovakia that commenced on Sunday afternoon.
Earlier in the morning Francis met with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, whose convictions on welcoming migrants are the exact opposite of his own.
"I asked the pope to not let Christian Hungary be lost," the head of the government wrote on Facebook after the formal 40-minute meeting.
Welcoming migrants was not discussed
During the meeting, described by the Vatican as "cordial", Orbán gave Francis a copy of a letter Hungary’s King Béla IV sent to Pope Innocent IV in 1250.
The king begged the pope to help him against the Tatar invasions that threatened Christian Hungary.
The choice of such a gift was not made by chance. Observers in Rome and Budapest had been speculating for weeks about how Francis’ encounter with the prime minister would go.
The 84-year-old pope never directly addressed the issue of Hungary welcoming migrants during his brief stop in Budapest. But he made several clear references to the need to welcome those who are, while preserving the country’s Christian "roots".
"The cross, planted in the ground, not only invites us to be well-rooted, it also raises and extends its arms towards everyone," Francis exclaimed before praying the Angelus after Mass.
“The cross urges us to keep our roots firm, but without defensiveness; to draw from the wellsprings, opening ourselves to the thirst of the men and women of our time,” he said.
“My wish is that you be like that: grounded and open, rooted and considerate,” the pope added.
On several occasions, Francis also praised the merits of diversity in society, as he did in a meeting with Hungary’s Catholic bishops.
"Diversity always proves a bit frightening," the pope admitted.
But he said it is a fear that must not be indulged.
"In the face of cultural, ethnic, political and religious diversity, we can either retreat into a rigid defense of our supposed identity, or become open to encountering others and cultivating together the dream of a fraternal society," he told the bishops.
"Outbursts of hatred"
To support his call to fraternity, Pope Francis referred extensively to Hungary's past, and in particular to the situation of Jewish communities.
The 75,000 to 100,000 Jews living in the country today maintain good relations with the government, which has supported the construction of several synagogues.
But Hungarian Jews remain deeply scarred by the Holocaust.
Between May and July 1944, some 440,000 Jews were deported to the extermination camps.
The pope called this "the darkest and most depraved abyss of humanity", quoting Jewish authors like Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész who survived the ordeal.
In a meeting with non-Catholic religious leaders, both Jewish and Christian, he warned that the lessons from this dramatic history must not be ignored.
"Whenever we were tempted to absorb the other, we were tearing down instead of building up. Or when we tried to ghettoize others instead of including them" he said.
Francis also condemned the "outbursts of hatred" that seek to "destroy" fraternity.
"I think of the threat of anti-Semitism still lurking in Europe and elsewhere. It is a fuse that must not be allowed to burn," he warned.
He said religious leaders must be "roots of peace and shoots of unity" in order to "help our contemporaries to accept and to love one another".
In his few speeches, delivered during a very brief stopover in Budapest, the pope put forth a very demanding program.
Loup Besmond de Senneville is La Croix's permanent French correspondent in Rome and is travelling on the papal plane during the apostolic visit to Budapest and Slovakia.