Pope Francis has challenged Catholics in Hungary to make a deeper commitment to following Jesus, saying it is not enough to just call oneself Catholic. “Jesus unsettles us; he is not satisfied with declarations of faith, but asks us to purify our religiosity!” the Pope said Sunday morning in Budapest while presiding at the closing Mass of the 52nd Inter-national Eucharistic Congress. He urged a hushed crowd of some 100,000 people who gathered in a sun-baked Heroes Square not to reduce Christianity to “defend-ing our image”, but to allow Jesus to “heal us of our self-absor-ption” and “open our hearts to self-giving.” The seven-hour stop in Budapest was the start of a three-and-a-half-day papal visit to Slovakia that commenced on Sunday afternoonon Sept. 12.
Earlier in the morning Francis met with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, whose convictions on welcoming mig-rants are the exact opposite of his own. “I asked the Pope to not let Christian Hungary be lost,” the head of the government wrote on Facebook after the formal 40-minute meeting. Welcoming migrants was not discussed During the meeting, described by the Vatican as “cordial”, Orbán gave Francis a copy of a letter Hungary’s King Béla IV sent to Pope Innocent IV in 1250.