Pope meets refugees, urges Hungary to show charity to all

Pope Francis thanked Hungarians on Saturday for welcoming Ukrainian refugees and urged them to help anyone in need, while calling for a culture of charity in a country where the prime minister has justified strong anti-immigration policies over fears that migration threatens Christian culture in Europe. .

On the second day of a visit to Hungary, Francis met refugees and poor people at St. Elizabeth’s Church — named after a Hungarian princess who renounced her wealth to devote herself to the poor as a follower of the pope’s namesake, St. Francis from Assisi.

The refugees included some who had fled to Hungary from neighboring Ukraine, seeking safety from the Russian war.

Immediately afterwards, Francis met the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in Hungary, Metropolitan Hilarion. The Vatican said the 20-minute meeting at the Holy See’s embassy in Budapest was “cordial”.

The Russian Church’s support of the Kremlin’s war has prevented a papal meeting with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Francis and Kirill had a meeting in Cuba in 2016 that was the first between a pope and an Eastern Orthodox leader in centuries.

Speaking at Budapest’s white-brick St. Elizabeth’s Church, Francis recalled that the Gospel instructs Christians to show love and compassion to all, especially those experiencing poverty and pain and “even those who disbelieve.”

“The love that Jesus gives us and commands us to practice can help eradicate the evils of indifference and selfishness from society, our cities and the places where we live – indifference is a plague – and the hope of a new, more just and fraternal world, where everyone can feel at home,” he said.

Hungary’s nationalist government has pursued a firm anti-immigration policy, refusing to take in many asylum seekers trying to enter the country through the southern border, leading to protracted legal disputes with the European Union.

Conservative populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said migration threatens to replace Christian culture in Europe. Orbán, who has been in office since 2010, has hinged several election campaigns on the threats he believes migrants and refugees pose to Hungarians.

While Orbán’s government has consistently rejected asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa, some 2.5 million Ukrainians fleeing war in their country have found open doors. About 35,000 of the refugees remain in Hungary and have applied for temporary protection there, according to the UN.

Yet financial support for Ukrainian refugees has been meager. Fewer Ukrainians have chosen to stay in Hungary than any other country in Eastern Europe except Belarus.

Olesia Misiats chose to stay; she was a nurse working in a Kiev COVID-19 hospital when she fled with her mother and two daughters on February 24 last year. She first went to the Netherlands, but the high costs forced her to move to Hungary, where she says she found an apartment and gave birth to her third daughter, Mila, who sat in the pews with her mother and sister on Saturday.

“It’s safe here,” Misiats said of her new life. She said she hoped to return to Kiev one day, but for now she and her children are adjusting. “I want to go back home. There it’s my life, it was my life,” she said. “But the war has changed my life.”

There were remarkably few people of color in the pews. Among them was artist and filmmaker Abouzar Soltani, a refugee from Iran who spent 553 days in one of Hungary’s transit zones with his 10-year-old son Armin after Hungarian authorities rejected their asylum applications in 2018.

Soltani later said of their 18-month stay in container shelters that they felt like “fish in an aquarium.” When a European court decision closed the transit zones, Soltani chose to remain in Hungary, where he still lives.

Francis praised Hungary’s Catholic Church for providing aid to people fleeing war and urged charity for all those in need. He heard of members of a Ukrainian family who fled the Russian invasion and traveled for days to reach Hungary after rockets rained down on their hometown of Dnipro last May.

Oleg Yakovlev said he decided to bring his wife and five children to Hungary because he had worked there years ago as a cook and remembered that he was welcome there.

“Hungary has been the beginning of a new life for us and our children, of a new possibility,” Yakovlev told Francis as his two eldest children played an Argentine tango on accordion and saxophone for the Argentine pope. “We were welcomed here and found a new home.”

At the end of the event, a group of Hungarian Roma musicians serenaded the Pope, with a standing ovation and cheers from the audience and a thumbs up from Francis.

Francis started his Saturday visit with children with visual and physical disabilities. In the afternoon, he has his first major public event in Hungary, a youth meeting in the city’s sports stadium.

He planned to round off his visit with an open-air mass on Sunday and a speech at Budapest’s Pázmány Péter Catholic University.

When Francis arrived in Hungary on Friday, he urged Europe to recover its fundamental values ​​of peaceful unity while denouncing the “adolescent belligerence” of Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine.