The Hungarian Ministry of Education had asked the Churches and various civil groups their opinion about a possible amendment of the law, to be voted in September, on the integration of disabled pupils in schools. The Hungarian Bishops’ Conference formulated its opinion, after consulting among others the Catholic Pedagogical Institute, in a document later leaked by the Ministry. A daily paper reported some isolated passages from it, and at the same time various interpretations appeared that made the Church seem wholly unfavourable to the integration of disabled pupils. To clarify its own position, the secretary of the Hungarian Bishops’ Conference Monsignor András Veres, auxiliary bishop of Budapest, held a press conference in recent days and sent a letter to the media. The position of the Hungarian episcopate is spelt out in the statement. It concerns “on the one hand the precariousness of the funding that ought to ensure the promotion of integration”. Bishop Veres explained that the Church “is far from contrary to integration, to which the various institutions it runs bear eloquent witness, but is opposed to any forced integration that does not take into account the educational level and potential of the person to be integrated. The Hungarian Church thus underlines the need for institutions specialized in the development of disadvantaged and handicapped pupils”. According to the bishop, “the attacks against the Church, the language and the tendentiousness of the presentations recall the openly anticlerical atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s, whereas the accusation of ‘segregationism’ should be applied instead to the financial activity of the State that penalises the schools run by the Churches”. In the autumn of last year, in fact, a controversy broke out between the Ministry and the Hungarian Churches on the funding of schools. The government, contrary to the terms of the concordat between the Vatican and the Republic of Hungary, had removed some supplementary benefits from schools run by the Churches.
