Pope urges people to be more accepting of migrants during visit to Hungary

Pope Francis prayed for peace in Ukraine and urged people to be more accepting of migrants during a three-day visit to Hungary, where the nationalist government is hostile to most refugees and has relatively close ties with Russia and chilly relations with Kyiv.

The pope’s itinerary included a meeting with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who portrays himself as a defender of conservative “Christian values” while overseeing arguably Europe’s most draconian asylum system and demonising non-Christian refugees and migrants as a threat to the continent’s security, identity and traditions.

Mr Orban, who decries Western sanctions against Moscow which were imposed due to its aggression against Ukraine, rarely criticises Russia’s invasion of its neighbour and refuses to send arms to Kyiv or allow their delivery via Hungary.

“How sad and painful it is to see closed doors,” Francis said during a Sunday Mass attended by tens of thousands of people beside the Danube.

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“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,” the pope said.

After meeting Mr Orban on Friday, Francis used a speech in Hungary’s presidential palace to quote King Stephen, the 11th century ruler credited with adopting Christianity as the country’s official religion and who was later canonised.

“St Stephen bequeathed to his son extraordinary words of fraternity when he told him that those who arrive with different languages and customs ‘adorn the country,’” Francis said, citing the king’s call to “‘welcome strangers with benevolence and to hold them in esteem’.”

After shutting its borders to mostly Muslim migrants from the Middle East, North Africa and central Asia over the last decade, Hungary allowed some two million mostly white, Christian Ukrainians to enter when Russia launched its all-out invasion last February; about 35,000 of them have applied for temporary protection in the country.

The pope met Ukrainian refugees on Saturday as rescue workers in their homeland searched in vain for more survivors from a Russian missile strike a day earlier on an apartment block in the city of Uman, which killed at least 23 civilians, including six children.

Refugee Oleh Yakovlev told Francis how he and his wife and five children had fled the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine last year after Russian bomb attacks.

“We were welcomed here and we have found a new home [but] many have suffered and suffer still because of the war,” Yakovlev said.

Francis said “we need a Church that is fluent in the language of charity, that universal language which everyone can hear and understand, even those farthest from us, even those who are not believers.”

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The pope also held what the Vatican called a “cordial” 20-minute meeting with Metropolitan Hilarion, the representative in Hungary of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is closely aligned with the Kremlin and supports the invasion of Ukraine that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions.

Francis said during Mass that he prayed especially for “the beleaguered Ukrainian people and the Russian people,” and called for a “desire to build peace and to give the younger generations a future of hope, not war; a future full of cradles not tombs; a world of brothers and sisters, not walls and barricades.”