TRANSCRIPT — ADDRESS OF THE PRIME MINISTER OF HUNGARY

Bálint Szentkirályi, on the steps of the Esztergom Basilica, at the state welcome of His Holiness Pope Athanasius

14 December 2030 — Official transcript, Office of the Prime Minister. Delivered in Hungarian; official English translation. Annotations of the record are retained.

Your Holiness. Eminences. Fellow citizens. People of the whole world who hear this on the radio, in whatever language reaches you —

Isten hozta. In my language this is how we say welcome, and I ask the translators of the world to render it exactly, because it is not a pleasantry. It means: God has brought you. Today, on these steps, above this river, in this cold, I believe the words mean precisely what they say. [applause]

Your Holiness, you have come to a small city. We know it is a small city. Thirty thousand souls, one great dome, one slow river. You have come from Rome, which was the capital of the world when my ancestors were still following their herds across the steppe. We do not pretend to be Rome. We offer you something else, which is a thousand years of not being extinguished. [applause]

On this hill, Saint Stephen, our first king, was born, and was crowned, and made of a wandering people a Christian nation. Before he died he wrote instructions to his son. One sentence of them, written a thousand years ago, I want to read tonight to the whole world, because the whole world has just been addressed in six and a half thousand languages, and I think our first king would have understood that better than any statesman of the last century. He wrote: nam unius linguae uniusque moris regnum imbecille et fragile est. “For a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile.” [applause] A thousand years ago, on this hill, that was already known. Guests, Stephen wrote, bring different tongues and customs, and different tongues and customs adorn the kingdom. Your Holiness: you are the guest he was writing about. Hungary receives tonight a Pope of Africa, of Ethiopia, of a Church older in Christ than almost any in Europe — and by the instruction of our founding king, we are not diminished by this. We are adorned. [sustained applause]

I must speak also of grief, because Hungarians do not trust a welcome that pretends there is no grief.

A hundred and ten years ago, in a palace far from here, they took the sea from Hungary. One signature, and a nation that had a port and a fleet and an horizon became a nation of the interior, locked in the middle of the continent. We mourned it for a century. We wrote poems about a coastline we could no longer visit. Ask any Hungarian schoolchild; the wound has a name; I do not need to say it here. [murmuring]

And now — now the sea has been taken from the whole world. Every nation on this earth has become, in one year, what Hungary was made in one afternoon: a country of the interior, mourning an horizon. I take no satisfaction in this. Hear me clearly: no satisfaction. But I will say this, and I ask the nations to hear it as it is meant, from an old landlocked heart to a newly landlocked world: it can be survived. We are the proof. You learn the rivers. You learn the rail. You learn your neighbours, because you can no longer sail away from them. And you learn that a nation is not its coastline; a nation is its language, its memory, and its dead — and those, no stone in the sky has claimed. [long applause]

Of those stones I will say only what a head of government may honestly say. I do not know who commands the waters. I know who commands my conscience. [applause] The government of Hungary will comply with the withdrawal, fully, because we will not spend Hungarian lives on gestures. And the government of Hungary will keep its soul its own, because that was not in the message, and we have refused larger empires than the sky. [applause]

Your Holiness, half a century ago a Prince-Primate of Esztergom was taken from this city in chains by an empire that also believed it did not need to explain itself. His motto was two words: devictus vincit — defeated, he conquers. He came home to this hill in the end, and the empire did not. That is the entire history of Hungary in one sentence, and tonight it is our gift to the universal Church: take the motto, Holy Father. It has been tested locally. [laughter, applause]

Therefore, before God and this assembly, I make the pledge that my government will bring to the National Assembly as law — the Lex Strigoniensis: the Apostolic See in Esztergom shall be sovereign, free, and inviolable; guest, never hostage; honoured, never used. Hungary asks for nothing in return. To be the doorstep is enough. It has always been our position on the map, [laughter] and we have decided, at last, to be proud of it. [applause]

Holy Father: the dome above us was raised by our great-great-grandfathers out of the ruins the wars left on this hill. They built it larger than the ruin. That is the only advice Hungary presumes to give the Church tonight: build it larger than the ruin.

Isten hozta Szentatyánkat. God has brought our Holy Father. Welcome home to a home you have never seen. [ovation]

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