LGBTQ relationships will only have equal rights with traditional marriage when the goalpost is worth the same as a goal, or ignorance becomes an alternative to knowledge, Gyula Márfi tells Mandiner. The interview with the retired archbishop of Veszprém also discusses what he thinks about the left-wing prime minister candidate, Europe's decadent crisis and the state of the Hungarian church.

He often talks about the fact that we live in a decadent, declining age. Why do you see it that way?

When the European Coal and Steel Community was created in 1950, big-name politicians like Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Alcide De Gasperi shaped the continent's destiny. They started Europe on the way to the union. At that time, a tender was launched for the design of a common flag, which was won by Arséne Heitz's design out of 101 entries - this is the EU flag still known today, with twelve stars. This symbol came from the miraculous medal to the flag, because Heitz was a religious man, just like the founding fathers. The Book of Revelation also mentions "the woman clothed in the Sun" with a crown of twelve stars. I say all this in order to highlight: the Christian faith lived when the foundations of the union were laid. Decades later, however, when the EU constitution was created, Christianity could not even be mentioned. This is scandalous because it was Christianity that preserved for posterity the Greco-Roman tradition that the document mentions, for example. They included the merits of the Enlightenment and its basic ideas, which can also only be found in Christian societies. Let's look, for example, for equality in India, or freedom in Islamic countries...! Europe is denying its own roots and doing many terrible things.

Scary things?

A very illustrative example: in 2016, a calendar was published by the European Union that included the holidays of the major world religions. Even the Sikh religious holidays were marked in it, but when we turned to December 25, we saw a blank page in front of us. There was not a single word about the birth of Jesus... Christmas trees, roadside crosses, Nativity scenes, everything that refers to Christianity, and slowly even the word Christmas itself are disappearing all over Europe. Europe is in crisis, returning to the declining phase of the Roman Empire, and perhaps even earlier: to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Gergely Vágvölgyi's entire article on Mandine .

Featured image: Mandiner, Dávid Mátrai