The Greek Catholic church renovated with the support of the Hungarian state was consecrated in Nagypelesk, Szatmár County, Romania.
János Árpád Potápi, the State Secretary of the Prime Minister's Office responsible for national policy, who participated in the event on October 1, recalled in his greeting: when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán donated millennium flags to Hungarian settlements and churches across the border in 2000, he mentioned that one half of the flag was embroidered, the the other, empty half will be filled by time. The state secretary believed that there is not much space left on the millennium flags, but there will always be important events that still fit there.
János Árpád Potápi touched on the fact that in the Carpathian Basin, about three thousand churches and church buildings have been renovated in the past period, 1,600 of them outside the borders of Hungary. Forty of these belonged to the Greek Catholic Church.
The state secretary mentioned that the prayers of the faithful also helped in the recovery of the priest from Nagypeleska, who was hospitalized with a coronavirus infection. He encouraged the faithful to get vaccinated if they haven't done so yet.
Pastor Béla Pallai also mentioned his hospital experiences in his speech. The faithful could take home a prayer written to the Virgin from the ceremony, in which they beg for the end of the epidemic.
The consecration liturgy of the renovated church and iconostasis was led by Fülöp Kocsis, Archbishop-Metropolitan of Hajdúdorog Archdiocese.
The renovation of the church and the iconostasis was supported by the Hungarian state with HUF 174 million. At the time of the 2011 census, 737 people lived in Nagypelesk, adjacent to the Hungarian-Romanian state border, 91.6 percent of whom declared themselves Hungarian.
Source: MTI
