At his first official meeting in Budapest, Pope Francis met with President Katalin Novák at the Sándor Palace.
Once inside, the Pope met with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Using a translator, the Prime Minister expressed his gratitude for the papal visit and explained that this trip encouraging the country on its Christian path.
Following this meeting, the Pope and President Novák traveled to the seat of the Hungarian government to meet with a group of authorities, civil society and the diplomatic corps.
The President thanked Pope Francis for his visit in Spanish.
In Hungarian, it is Isten hozott and it literally means God has brought you to be with us.
In his speech, the Pope remembered the effects of World War II in Europe. He warned against having a short memory and allowing the same horrors to occur with the victims of the war in Ukraine.
POPE FRANCIS
At the international level, it even seems that politics have the effect of inflaming tempers rather than solving problems, oblivious to the maturity achieved after the horrors of war and regressing to a kind of wartime infantilism.
Pope Francis also described two dangers facing Europe today: being too rigid against any form of diversity and being too relaxed and compromising Christian beliefs.
POPE FRANCIS
This is the harmful path of 'ideological colonization,' which eliminates differences, as in the case of the so-called gender culture, or puts reductive concepts of freedom before the reality of life. For example, boasting as an achievement a senseless 'right to abortion,' which is always a tragic defeat.
The Pope closed his speech reflecting on the image of St. Stephen, the country's first king, as a model of fraternity in diversity between the different countries.
KG
