The road to be pursued

Peter Erdö was only four and a half years when, at dawn on 4 November 1956, 25,000 Soviet tanks invaded Hungary and occupied Budapest. So began the unequal contest between the occupying forces and Hungarian rebels asking for freedom. PETER ERDÖ has vivid memories of those days: “I remember the gunfire, lots of gunfire. I remember asking my mother: why are they shooting? And she replied “Because it’s a war”. Not a revolt, no, but a war. And I asked her again: who’s against us? My mother replied: “The Russians”. And I: who’s with us? And then my mother and father began to cry and replied: “No one”. Fifty years have gone by since then. Hungary today is like a great convalescent. The illness from which she suffered is no longer there, but her weakness is still great. And a full recovery is conditional on the conquest of the future, suggests Cardinal Peter Erdö, archbishop of Budapest and Primate of the Hungarian Church. The cardinal was in Venice in recent days, the guest of a great friend of his, Patriarch Scola (they studied together at the Lateran University in the 1990s), who had invited him to concelebrate the liturgies on the feast of St. Mark and to give the keynote address at the Dies Academicus, the inauguration of the new academic year of the Studium Generale Marcianum. Your Eminence, how is Hungary today, fifty years since the uprising in Budapest and the Soviet repression, and just over 15 years since the start of country’s new democratic course? “We have regained an incomparable good, the fruits of which we are now enjoying: freedom. For example, I think of the Church, and the great blossoming of its institutions. At the end of the Communist period, there were only 8 Catholic schools in the country: now there are 320. The religious orders had been suppressed, with the exception of four: now there are over a hundred religious congregations. And the movements – Focolarini, Neocatechumenals, Communion and Liberation, etc. – are numerous and full of energy. As for the faithful [65% of the 10 million Hungarians are Catholics], in Budapest 10% regularly go to mass. But it is just in the cities, rather than in rural areas, that we are witnessing a revival of interest in religion”. Has prosperity grown? “Yes and no. Some improvements can be seen for instance on the roads: the old Soviet-style Lada cars, for example, hardly circulate any more. The Hungarians, who have always appreciated good horses, now choose good cars. At times they spend beyond their means. But above all there is what the statistics tell us: the real value of the Gross Domestic Product, for each citizen, is no longer so high as it was at the end of the Eighties. It’s the price we have paid for trying to adjust the country to the market economy. Today, in Hungary, there are the super-rich, who didn’t exist before, and there are the poor reduced to absolute poverty, who also didn’t exist. There’s unemployment and there are the homeless: there are more of them than in Rome”. But haven’t the people re-gained serenity? “I would say that today relations between the Hungarians have become tenser. There was greater solidarity before, also because the country was occupied by foreign troops, and that’s why there was a tacit but strong bond of solidarity between everyone. That’s now gone. But we can also note something else”. What? “The deterioration of various public structures, from education to healthcare. It is no longer so easy to continue to guarantee these services, free of cost, to citizens. And families are unable to purchase them at a European level because they don’t have the necessary economic means. Moreover we have a major demographic problem: low birth rate, legalised abortion and an ageing population have the result that the country is losing 40-50,000 people each year”. In this context what can Catholics do? “Meanwhile we are beginning once again to take seriously our responsibility at the level of charity. It’s especially to the rich I have been saying for years they must learn to shoulder their responsibility: they have a social responsibility to the country”. How can Hungary emerge from convalescence and regain her health? “The Hungarian Catholic Church has proclaimed for 2006 a year of prayer for the spiritual renewal of the nation. I think this is the road we need to pursue. After Hungary’s defeat in 1956 most people were demoralized and sought refuge in private life, ignoring the great social questions. But this has led to a way of life without a future. Today we still feel the effects of this period, but we need to raise our head again and take seriously our re-won freedom to re-design a vision for the future”. And, lastly, what are your relations with Russia? “After the words of remorse and regret spoken in Budapest by the then President Yeltsin, in 1992, and after the visit to our country and the speeches of the Patriarch of Moscow in 1994, I think we no longer feel the need for new expressions of regret for what happened in the past. I think we need instead to continue the process of reconciliation, which depends on mutual understanding and the promotion of new cultural, human and economic relations with our neighbouring countries. Our correspondence with Patriarch Alexis II of Moscow also goes in this direction”.