Hungary: Pope urges Orban to take in more migrants, ‘opening ourselves to the thirst of men and women of our time’
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Orban, in response, noted that today’s migrants “are all Muslims” and said: “I asked Pope Francis not to let Christian Hungary perish.”
But the Pope doesn’t care about Christian Hungary. He sees no obligation to open himself to the thirst of the natives of Europe who want to be safe from jihad and Islamization. His pastoral concern is strictly one-sided.
“Pope urges Orban’s Hungary to be more open to needy outsiders,” by Philip Pullella and Gergely Szakacs, Reuters, September 13, 2021 (thanks to Henry):
Budapest: Pope Francis said on Sunday that Hungary could preserve its Christian roots while opening up to the needy, an apparent response to nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s stand that Muslim immigration could destroy its heritage.
Francis was in Hungary for an unusually short stay that underlined differences with the anti-immigrant Orban, his political opposite.
Closing a Church congress with a Mass for tens of thousands of people in central Budapest, Francis used the imagery of a cross to show that something as deeply rooted as religious belief did not exclude a welcoming attitude.
“The cross, planted in the ground, not only invites us to be well-rooted, it also raises and extends its arms towards everyone,” he said in his remarks after the 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 at the end of the open-air Mass, which Orban attended with his wife.
“My wish is that you be like that: grounded and open, rooted and considerate,” the Pope said.
Francis has often denounced what he sees as a resurgence of nationalist and populist movements, and has called for European unity, and criticised countries that try to solve the migration crisis with unilateral or isolationist actions.
Orban, by contrast, told the Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia last week the only solution to migration was for the European Union to “give all rights back to the nation state”.
The Pope has called for migrants to be welcomed and integrated to tackle what he has called Europe’s “demographic winter”. Orban said in Slovenia that today’s migrants “are all Muslims” and that only “the traditional Christian family policy can help us out of that demographic crisis”….
“I asked Pope Francis not to let Christian Hungary perish,” Orban said on Facebook. Hungarian news agency MTI said Orban gave Francis a facsimile of a letter that 13th century King Bela IV sent to Pope Innocent IV asking for help in fighting the Tartars….