Pope Francis made a three day visit to Hungary at the end of April. The significance of the visit – why he went there and what he said – will become apparent as the year progresses, as the war in Europe continues to escalate and as the effects of “ideological colonisation” across the West, about which Pope Francis also warned, becomes even more evident in the Oireachtas, on our streets, and in our schools.
Pope Francis was speaking not alone to Hungary, and the Hungarian diaspora, but to all of Europe – especially to Ukraine and Russia – and to the West. What was especially evident was his personal committment to supporting dialogue between the protagonists in the war in Ukraine and to the welfare of children caught up in the war.
Pope Francis affirmed Hungary’s culture of life, marriage and family – the cornerstone of its domestic social policies. Such a culture is the antithesis of EU woke social policies. Europe is neither sustainable nor stable.
The Vaticans hoped-for outcome from the Pope’s visit is to ‘nudge’ Russia and the West/Ukraine towards a dialogue and, also, to guide the West back from the brink of a different, but no less destructive, ideological war.
MIGRATORY PRESSURES
The backdrop to the Pope’s visit to Hungary is the massive migratory pressures – economic, political and cultural – on Europe which can only increase. These pressures interface, paradoxically, with the EU’s own dysfunctional demographics: unsustainably low levels of fertility and birth rates and the displacement of any political advocacy affirming the biological family. The EU has in practice shut out the importance of marriage to demographic outcomes and societal stability. These are all of a piece: collectively they impel Europe towards the ‘future shock’ of the EU’s impending ‘demographic winter’, including the fiscal burden of future EU care and social supports for an aging EU, with an emaciated family structure.
In Budapest, Pope Francis commended Hungary’s support for Ukraine and it’s sovereignty, even as he called for ‘open hearts and open borders’ and ‘inclusiveness’, code for criticism of Hungary’s immigration policies which are aligned to its democratically mandated national and cultural values.
The Pope rightly prioritises the moral principles of the parable of The Good Samaritan. The EU’s criticisms of Hungary’s migration policies, however, ignore the the obvious ‘democratic defecit’ in member countries, such as Ireland’s, implementation of EU migration policies.
HUNGARY: RIGHT PLACE AND RIGHT TIME
In Ireland, and across the now secularized West, Papal visits are largely regarded as choreographed photo opps that can be accommodated to the mainstream narrative. This visit was different. It was significant in its location, in its timing and in the urgency of the issues addressed by Pope Francis.
The theme of the Pope’s Visit, “Christ is our future,” is a revolutionary argument, not least in Europe and across the West. Cardinal Erdő, its spiritual leader and a possible future Pope, highlighted this theme prior to the papal visit. He explained: “Faith is always a revolutionary attitude.”
Christianity – once the cornerstone of Europe’s identity and its aesthetic – is certainly countercultural now. There has been a sharp increase in the number of Churches desecarated across Europe.
The ‘set piece’ speeches of Papal visits are what endures. Pope St John Paul II ‘s farewell speech after his first visit to Ireland was prophetic. It resonates powerfully with the EU, and the West, that Pope Francis addressed in Budapest. These things only become apparent in retrospect. Pope St John Paul 11’s searing critique of the choices confronting Ireland back then were not evident to the crowds gathered to hear him at Limerick racecourse. They are now. It’s the same with the EU.
In 1979 Pope he called on an increasingly secular Ireland to reflect on the gravity of the choices they confronted. “The Irish people have to choose today their way forward. Will it be the transformation of all strata of humanity into a new creation – or the way that many nations have gone, giving excessive importance to economic growth and material possessions while neglecting the things of the spirit?….The way of false freedom which is only slavery to decadence? Will it be the way of subjugating the dignity of the human person to the totalitarian domination of the State? Ireland must choose..”
His message is every bit as relevant to contemporary Europe as it was to Ireland in 1979. When the test came, in the aftermath of the banking/sovereign debt crisis, Ireland chose – badly. It sold out it’s patrimony, its spiritual capital.
International actors also calculated they could take down ‘Catholic’ Ireland – as Pope St John Paul II had warned – on abortion and therefore, they reasoned, use that to impact other Catholic countries.
But they were wrong about formerly Christian Europe. That reflects the importance of today’s Christian witness in Hungary.
Hungary, impacted by the same banking/ sovereign debt crisis exacerbated by negative demographics, chose wisely. It’s insistence on relational autonomy within the EU contrasts with Ireland’s dependency, its adoption of the EU’s oppressive woke politics, and its pro- military world view.
Most recently, the Irish Government has sought to impel Ireland to discard it’s tradition of military neutrality, even as Hungary, almost alone in the EU, reinforced Pope Francis strong advocacy for peace talks during his visit to Budapest.
Hungary has built on its millennium- old Christian culture, embedded in legacy of St. Stephen and in the diversity of outstanding examples of sanctity cited by Pope Francis
Today, Europe and our world faces grave choices as Ireland once did in 1979.. The history and aesthetic of the Hungarian nation, and it’s capital city Budapest, as well as the the timing of the Pope’s visit, stand against the zeitgeist of a now decadent West.
In Budapest, Pope Francis addressed a Europe once again at war He spoke to the consequences of a once-Christian civilization now under siege from ideological colonization. The pathology of this ideology presents as a “right” to non-medical abortion, the deconstruction of the biological family and, oppressively, gender theory – a breakdown in human anthropology, characterized by a disregard for God, biological realities and language. In a word, nihilism.
Reflecting on the challenges of war and ideology facing Europe, Pope Francis painted a different vision in Hungary: “How much better it would be to build a Europe centered on the human person and on its peoples…(that) allows room for the different countries of the European Union and the different communities within each nation to assert their own identities but not at the cost of denigrating or denying the rights of others.
As a Christian nation, Hungary guarantees the right to freedom of religion and freedom from religious discrimination. In Ireland, by contrast, active discrimination against Catholics seems to be taking root.Hungary’s identity is integrally bound up with the enduring legacy of St Stephen . Today, some 36% of Hungary’s population are Catholic.
At the same time, Hungary is led by a Prime Minister, and guided by a President, that are from the minority Calvinist faith which account for just 10% .
Hungary’s Christian ethos and national values have fostered marriage, with all of the ‘social capital’ this generates. It has reversed the demographic decline that economists, and Pope Francis, have highlighted is wreaking havoc across the EU’s labour markets and it’s social security systems.
Pope Francis commended Hungary for it’s ‘Family Friendly’ policies. It’s Constitution and laws affirm values, once shared by Ireland, rooted in life, marriage and the Family as the fundamental social unit, around which its innovative pro-family fiscal policies have been crafted.
Hungary is, of course, a nation that the EU elite like to denigrate: its politics are, they assert, contrary to ‘European Values’. And yet Gramsci has now displaced Schumann within the mind-set of the Commission.
The EU insist that Hungarian politics is repressive and anti-democratic and ‘non-inclusive’. Self-awareness is always the first casualty when elites get into their stride.
It is classic gaslighting. Pope Francis was visiting a nation that has been invaded, time and again over the centuries, suffered but endured, never surrendering it’s identity or it cultural and spiritual heritage. In the wake of the first World War Hungary was dismembered by the allies. It endured the trauma of ceding two thirds of its territory and a third of its population to neighbouring countries, leaving it with a substantial, but culturally vulnerable, ethnic minorities in these countries including Ukraine.
World War II saw the carve-up of Europe by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Hungary was, again, put into play and ceded by the West to Stalin. It endured the oppression of Soviet Marxism, which begat critical theory, including gender theory.
This oppression led to the evisceration of political and religious freedoms by a political elite. Ahh yes! a political elite. In 1948 Cardinal Minsenky, who stood against the religious oppression of Christians and Jews during the war, was sentenced by the Communists ‘People’s Court’ to life imprisonment by the same elite. Beware the cult of “Hate Speech” promulgated and enforced by elites. The 1956 political uprising in Budapest was brutally suppressed by the elite that was wholly unrepresentative of the people. The parallels with contemporary Ireland are disconcerting.
It is a moving experience speaking with Hungarians who, as young students, remember the suppression of freedoms and the lies to which young adults were required to assent.
All of this means that there were good reasons why Hungary, with it’s Christian sensibilities and culture, its history and it’s location was the right place for Pope Francis to plead for a new dynamic of peace to resolve Europe’s destructive proxy war.
Budapest is among the most beautiful of European capital cities, where East and West interface; a city of Bridges, a powerful metaphor, as Pope Francis pointed out, for reaching out to ‘the other’. It is built on the Danube – one of the great rivers that gird Europe. Pope Francis came to a strong European nation to plead against a war that bisects Europe.
In Budapest, the Pope paid tribute to Hungary’s response to the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hungary has embraced over a million Ukrainian refugees. It has unequivocally supported it’s sovereignty. It’s Parliament, where Pope Francis met it’s President and it’s Prime Minister, is stunning. Hungary’s Parliament legislates for policies framed, in the first instance, not in the first instance, around MNC’s or globalism but around the national interest of its people.
President Novák, young, accomplished and the mother of three children, welcomed Pope Francis to her country and to her capital city. In her Inauguration speech last year she highlighted Hungary’s immediate and instinctive efforts to embrace, to house, educate and find work for refugees. One year on, Hungary continues to provide humanitarian and other support to Kyiv, even as Hungary is impacted by rapid inflation, domestic budgetary pressures and oppressive EU restrictions on its access to billions of Euro under the Pandemic-Fund.
President Novack told Pope Francis that Hungarians hoped to receive encouragement from him in their quest to help make Europe more peaceful, more democratic and stronger.
In her welcome President Novack noted that over the past 30 years, Hungarian Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants have joined forces in “the ecumenism of the preservation of Christian values regarding marriage, family life and (non-medical) abortion.” And yet that’s the core of what the EU pushes back against – the paradox at the heart of the EU’s incessant criticism of Hungary.
Poor Ireland. Hungary affirms today what Ireland once stood for: an advocate for Peace in a Europe that paradoxically urges Militarization, and more weapons as instruments of peace.
Hungary is a nation whose politics are rooted in Christian Democracy, whose Business Model pivots, not on the priorities of multinationals and overseas investment funds, but on the Family; a nation mindful of a history of oppression by a tiny Marxist elite, and whose education policies firmly reject the infiltration of it’s schools by proponents of a dystopian gender theory.
When Pope Francis spoke on the final day of his visit to Hungary, he was speaking to a world: “..threatened by the icy winds of war and want, by rivers of blood, by impacts on women and children, by existential threat of nuclear war”. At an earlier stage in the conflict, Pope Francis had observed that both protagonists had issues to address. He reiterated in Hungary what he had previously insisted, that nothing could justify Russia’s invasion. He called for an immediate ceasefire and advocated that Ukraine and Russia engage. He pointed out that a settlement cannot be imposed but must respect sovereignty, territorial integrity’ – and ‘other matters’, without specifying what these ‘other matters’ might be.
Importantly, Pope Francis had lamented the failure of an ‘imaginative search for peace’ in Europe and the descent into ‘teenage belligerence’. The implication was clear, at least to some journalists and commentators. He was suggesting that Europe hasn’t done enough in the search for peace.
“ARMS AND SANCTIONS WILL NOT PRODUCE PEACE..”
Crucially, Pope Francis said that ‘arms and sanctions will not produce peace’. The point bears reflecting on because it runs counter to EU and Western policy as they have unfolded.
The Stockholm Institute for Peace Research (SIPRI), an authoritative independent institute, reported that in 2022, ” arms imported by European countries – the vast majority of which came from the US – increased by 47% and those by European NATO countries by as much as 65%.
It would be wrong to politicize such data. It would be equally wrong to ignore what it is telling us. The ever-increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, flow of arms haven’t produced peace.
Neither will they. It is far less burdensome – and much more profitable – to make weapons than to ‘risk’ making peace. Pope Francis’s point that ‘arms and sanctions will not produce peace’ increasingly strikes a chord. Hungary’s approach to EU sanctions has been criticized by the EU, even though it reflects it’s land- locked location and it’s national economic imperatives.
The ‘Financial Times’ recently carried a feature by the author of research carried out by the authorative Center for Economic Research and Policy ( CEPR) “The Harm that Sanctions Do to the Vulnerable ” May 4th). It analyses the failure of the EU and the US to carry out a risk assessment of the potential impact successive rounds of sanctions.
He points out “..sanctions have become western countries’ foreign policy tool of choice to deal with hostile international actors… 27 per cent of all states — and 29 per cent of the world economy — are subject to sanctions. As recently as the 1990s, they affected less than 10 per cent of countries and about 5 per cent of the global economy.
Notwithstanding Western political rhetoric, sanctions have not proved effective but, instead, they have pushed a collaborative global economy towards autarky. They have deflected from the search for peace. More arms/ sanctions is the default position
The evidence shows sanctions make living conditions worse in target countries. Consistently, and in some instances dramatically, there are negative effects on measures ranging from poverty, inequality and economic growth to health conditions and human rights. In many cases, as the author points out, “the harm is similar to that suffered during armed conflicts, making economic sanctions possibly the deadliest weapon used by western powers”.
CONCLUSIONS
There were good reasons for the visit of Pope Francis to Budapest. The EU is embracing miltiarization – the antithesis of Pope Francis’s aspiration “to build a Europe centered on the human person and on its peoples”, which “is is Hungary’s ‘world view’
In Budapest, the Pope called for a Europe ‘which allows room for the different countries of the European Union and the different communities within each nation to assert their own identity without denigrating the rights of others’.
That, again, is a vision of Europe affirmed by Hungary – one which overlaps with it’s Christian Democratic political model. On that hinges the beginnings of peace – or an escalation of war and a wholly ruinous impact on geo political stability.
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