Pope Francis urged Hungarians to open their doors to others on Sunday, April 30, 2023, as he concluded a weekend visit with a plea for Europe to welcome migrants and the poor and for an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Francis issued the appeal from the banks of the Danube as he celebrated Mass on Budapest’s Kossuth Lajos Square, with the Hungarian Parliament and Budapest’s famed Chain Bridge as a backdrop.
The celebration provided the visual highlight of Francis’ three-day visit that has been dominated by the Vatican’s concern for the plight of neighboring Ukraine.
Citing local organizers, the Vatican disclosed that about 50,000 people attended the Mass, more than 30,000 of them in the square on a brilliantly sunny spring morning.
Among them were President Katalin Novak and Hungary’s right-wing populist Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, whose lukewarm support for Ukraine has irked fellow European Union members.
Francis has expressed appreciation for Hungary’s recent welcome of Ukrainian refugees. However, he has challenged Orban’s hard-line anti-immigration policies, which in 2015-2016 included building a razor wire fence on the border with Serbia to stop people from entering.
Upon arrival, Francis urged Hungary and Europe as a whole to welcome those who are fleeing war, poverty and climate change, calling for safe and legal migration corridors. In his Sunday homily on the Danube, the Pontiff said, “How sad and painful it is to see closed doors.”
“The closed doors of our selfishness with regard to others; the closed doors of our individualism amid a society of growing isolation; the closed doors of our indifference towards the underprivileged and those who suffer; the doors we close towards those who are foreign or unlike us, towards migrants or the poor.”
Pope Francis
Pope Prays For Peace In Ukraine
In a final prayer at the end of the Mass, Pope Francis prayed for peace in Ukraine and “a future of hope, not war, a future full of cradles, not tombs, a world of brothers and sisters, not walls.”
The 86-year-old Pope has tried to forge a diplomatic balancing act in his pleas to end Russia’s war, expressing solidarity with Ukrainians while keeping the door open to dialogue with Moscow. On Saturday, April 29, 2023, he prayed with Ukrainian refugees and then met with an envoy of Russian Patriarch Kirill, who has firmly supported Moscow’s invasion and justified it as a metaphysical battle against the liberal West.
Francis’ visit to Hungary, his second in as many years, brought him as close as he has been to the Ukrainian front but also to the heart of Europe, where Orban’s avowedly right-wing Christian government has cast itself as an embankment against a secularizing Western world.
Pope Francis has used the visit to call for the continent to find again its spirit of unity and purpose, referencing Budapest’s bridges across the Danube as symbols of unity and connection.
Francis ends his visit on Sunday with a speech on European culture at Budapest’s Pazmany Peter Catholic University.
