György Benyik, a Roman Catholic parish priest and theology teacher, was honored with the Pro Unitate in Christo award of the Reformed Antal Antal Theological and Cultural Foundation. The award was presented by Károly Fekete from Tiszántúli on Saturday night, in the Great Church of the Reformed Church in Debrecen. Reformed bishop and Zoltán Kustár, chairman of the board of trustees, the organizers told MTI.
According to their announcement, György Benyik contributed significantly to the theological dialogue between the domestic Catholic and Protestant churches, mutual knowledge and appreciation of each other, by founding and continuously organizing the Szeged Biblical Conference.
György Benyik launched the Szeged Biblical Conference series of events in 1989, which every year since then offers a meeting forum for Catholic biblical scholars from home and abroad.
Already in 1989, in connection with the first gathering, the question arose as to whether the conference should be open to other denominations. György Benyik decided in favor of the opening: the series of events in Szeged thus became the most important forum for ecumenical meeting and interdenominational dialogue for Hungarian-language practitioners of biblical studies.
Western European and Hungarian Protestant theologians, from here and beyond our borders, appeared one after the other among the speakers, and they were able to experience the ecumenical openness and fraternal atmosphere of the conference, and they were able to continue a meaningful interdenominational discourse regarding the Holy Scriptures, they wrote.
The notice reminds you: the board of trustees of the Antal Both Theological and Cultural Foundation founded the Pro Unitate in Christo award in November 2018 and adopted the procedure for donating the award. The name of the award in Hungarian translation: For unity experienced in Christ.
The primary goal of the award was to symbolically promote ecumenical, interdenominational dialogue in domestic and international terms, above all between the Roman Catholic and Reformed churches.
The prize, which can be awarded to one person per year, has so far been awarded to Roman Catholic theologian Mihály Kránicz, professor at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and to Reformed pastor Zoltán Bóna, former general secretary of the Ecumenical Council of Hungarian Churches (MEÖT), editor-in-chief of the Theologiai Szemle journal, the announcement said.
Source and image: MTI
