The essence of today's public endeavors in Europe is to deny the right to exist of the political world of values derived from Christianity, therefore in Western Europe we can no longer speak of Christian democracy - in its Central European and original sense - the minister in charge of the Prime Minister's Office declared on Thursday in Debrecen.
Gergely Gulyás recalled at the conference Pillars of modern Europe - the coexistence of religious communities that the words of former Prime Minister József Antall were still true thirty years ago. According to this, "in Europe, an atheist is also a Christian" , but today the goal of the zeitgeist, which is also being spread by the institutions of the European Union, is the exact opposite of this.
Western European Christian democracy, in the political sense, first gave up everything for power, and then lost power, the minister said. He noted that today, from Vienna to the West, Europe does not have a single Christian Democrat prime minister, even though previously, when the European Community still consisted of fifteen members, the majority of the heads of government of the member states belonged to this group of values or party family.
The situation today is that there is not a single prime minister not only from the ranks of the European conservatives, but even from the European People's Party, he added. It is also true that Central Europe, and Hungary within it, is going against the current European zeitgeist. For example, it is necessary to catch up with the western part of the continent economically and in terms of living standards, but it is necessary to prevent the "social development" experienced there from taking place in Central Europe as well.
According to the ruling party politician, the answer to the question of whether Europe still has common values, on which it built its alliances and political communities, is, perhaps there still are, but less and less. Gergely Gulyás explained that the social situation in Hungary is "incomparably better". According to the 2011 census, more than 55 percent of the people declared themselves to belong to some denomination, mostly to one of the historic Christian churches. According to a 2018 survey, 80 percent of Hungarians value Christianity, and according to the latest surveys, 68 percent of them identify as religious.
"The Christian culture that created Europe is a social value that is still alive in Hungary today," said the minister.
He reminded that since 2010, the number of students attending church-maintained public education or vocational training institutions has more than doubled. The interest in church higher education is unbroken, and the social, health and child protection institutions in the hands of the church are among the best in the country. Looking at the number of charitable donations , 786,000 people in 2010 and 1.4 million people in 2021 decided to donate a percentage of their taxes to a church, Gergely Gulyás listed.
He added that the commemorative year of the Reformation and this year's Eucharistic Congress showed the power of community and religious events and also that there is a "Christian renaissance" in Hungary, which is primarily based on faith.
Source: MTI
