Restless Hungary

Nowadays, many people ask what is happening in Hungary. Especially people who came to know and appreciate our country as the happiest barrack in the Eastern bloc and who knew from their own experience that it was an island in the great communist Red Sea, the Archipelago Goulash (alluding to the Archipelago Gulag in the Soviet Union). After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Hungary was for a while still a pioneer in the transformation to the market economy, to democracy, in short–in the direction of freedom. And now the economic data shows that Hungary is no longer a pioneer but has rather slipped backwards. Government policy is being branded illiberal 3 and despite more and more similar choices throughout Europe, we are still considered the forerunner of xenophobia. A country of hospitality has become a country of hostility towards guests. Help for understanding this is needed, urgently

Pray and Vaccinate: Worship and Pastoral Care in Times of Pandemic in Hungary

The major churches in Hungary—Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran—felt concerned about the Corona pandemic, especially about Sunday services. As in the spring wave, so in the autumn wave, the question of offline/online services was in the center of public communication. It has kerygmatic reasons—especially among Catholics—since, according to Vatican II, the Eucharist is the source and summit of the relationship with God. (Lumen Gentium 11.) Without Eucharistic celebration, congregations are grace-poor and priests, too, can feel deprived of their first-order mission and service-poor. Similarly, Protestant pastors experience and exercise their priestly ministry primarily through Sunday worship, preaching, and the Lord\u27s Prayer. During the pandemic, the highest effort of pastoral ministry can be experienced in the struggle for so called ‘despite services,’ which in my understanding are services held despite of the pandemic situation. Despite restrictions, in spite of technical problems, in spite of everything—the services must take place. If someone should get the idea to measure the degree of secularization by the attendance at mass during the Corona period, the study will most likely conclude that the number of services and the number of participants remain the same, only the form has partially changed