Prime Minister Viktor Orbán greeted the founding president of the Hungarian Charity Service, a monk of the Order of Mercy, in a letter at his diamond mass.
The servant is celebrating today, Father Imre Kozma said on Sunday morning, at the diamond mass held on the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood in the Szent Ferenc Sebe Church in Budapest. The monk pointed out: the life given for others is the true service, and he asked for himself that he could devote even the rest of his life to the service of God.
At the celebratory mass, Miklós Vecsei, the vice-president of the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service, praised Father Imre Kozma's six-decade-long priestly career, during which he founded the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service and revived the mission of healing the poor of the Hungarian Hospital Mercy Order.
The Hungarian Maltese Charity Service was formed in the 1980s from the religious community of the father who served as parish priest in Zugliget, and the charitable organization followed three teachings.
The first was that Christianity is not a theory, but a practice, service is inherent in living faith. The second is that love covers many sins, which meant that "good deeds do not have to wait until we become good people, but selfless deeds done for others will make us better." And the third teaching sounded like this: there is no life without taking risks, if we always count the chances, we will never start.
According to Miklós Vecsei, Father Imre Kozma showed in his personal life what it means to follow Jesus in practice. The Hungarian Charity Service of Malta tested its teachings for the first time in August 1989, when the first camp for East German refugees was opened in the garden of the church in Zugliget, followed by the Maltese mission during the Romanian Revolution and the South Slavic War, while the Charity Service became the dominant charitable organization in the country.
I never planned in advance, I always had tasks that faced me, this is what God called me to do - Father Imre Kozma said about his own career. Including his mission at the Hungarian Nursing Order of Mercy, he said: he understood that poor people are also more affected by diseases, which is why in 1997 it became an important vocation to build up the order's institutions and to spread the healing service again in Hungary.
At the diamond mass, the church was packed, many people came from hundreds of kilometers to be present at the festive occasion.
Residents of the disabled facility of the Maltese Charity Service in Páty made a "non-fading" bouquet of ceramic flowers for this occasion, in which each color represents a phase of the father's life.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén and László Kövér, the President of the Parliament, also greeted Father Imre Kozma in a letter at his diamond mass.
