«Morning Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, followed by a meeting with the Holy Father. “We must take advantage of this opportunity for peace!” Viktor Orbán published on social networks, as a summary of the visit he completed this morning to the Vatican.
The meeting with Pope Francis lasted 35 minutes. The Prime Minister of Hungary entered the Vatican audience complex, the “Paul VI Hall”, on foot early this Wednesday to meet with the Pontiff in one of his private rooms. The visit of the Hungarian leader is part of the series of meetings with world leaders that Orbán is holding while he holds the presidency of the European Union, a mandate that ends at the end of the year.
Very early, Francisco welcomed him at 7:45, and immediately the doors of the studio were closed to make way for a meeting between both leaders alone. At 8:20 the conversation concluded, and at 8:25 Orbán left the complex.
The war in Ukraine
Orbán’s online message, “we must take advantage of this opportunity for peace!”, suggests that the main issue on the table has been the war in Ukraine and the promise of the next US president, Donald Trump, to start the peace between kyiv and Moscow.
Hungary shares 166 km of its borders with Ukraine. Orbán condemns the invasion, but is the EU leader closest to Vladimir Putin and has opposed sanctions against Moscow and the shipment of weapons to kyiv. In 2022 he even said that Hungary is “along with the Vatican, the only European country that is working for peace.”
On the other hand, Viktor Orbán presents himself as a defender of Europe’s Christian identity. But his approach is very different from that of Pope Francis, who fears that it is a defense of Christianity more as a political value than a religious one.
A deluxe edition of the ‘Life of Christ’
On the part of the Vatican, it has only emerged that the Hungarian prime minister has given the Pope a deluxe edition of 1896 of the ‘Life of Christ’ by the popular French priest Henri Didon, who was a friend of the founder of the modern Olympic Games Pierre de Coubertin , and to whom the motto of the Olympics “Citius, Altius, Fortius”, “Faster, higher, stronger” is attributed; and a copy of a map of the Holy Land made in 1700.
The Pope has given him all the documents of his pontificate, including the Abu Dhabi declaration on universal human fraternity and his message for the World Day of Peace. Also, the same bas-relief that he has been delivering to the heads of government for a few months. The piece is titled “Tenderness and Love” and has an environmental message. “It expresses the message of love and custody of creation,” the Vatican explains in a note about the work of art. The sculpture represents Saint Francis of Assisi on one side, and a world “threatened by pollution” on the other. “It represents the need to harmonize peace and care for the environment with all humanity, remembering our responsibility towards creation so that the world is transformed into a habitable garden for all,” says the same text.
Their fifth meeting
This morning was the fifth meeting they have had, since they met for the first time on August 28, 2016 during a meeting of the Pope with European Christian parliamentarians. Their first meeting alone, however, did not take place until September 2021, when the pope spent a few hours in Budapest to close the International Eucharistic Congress.
They met again in April 2022, this time in the Vatican, a few days after Orbán won the general elections for the fourth time and two months after the Russian invasion, to address the reception of the first Ukrainian refugees. Their last meeting was in April 2023, at the Sándor Palace in Budapest, when the Pope made an official trip to Hungary.
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