The bishop of the Transylvanian Reformed Church District is 70 years old. Interview.

Béla Kató, the bishop of the Transylvanian Reformed Church District, turned seventy years old this week. create successful businesses: get the funds to build a youth center, church, kindergarten, old people's home for the community, and we also touched on whether he is even preparing for retirement in the midst of such a wide range of activities. From our interview, it turns out that the bishop will probably have the hundred thousand kilometers this year as well, as he said, that's how much he does every year, since as a bishop he said from the beginning that he doesn't want to sit in the office, but "to be there in the thick of life" so that the community can feel, " we belong together".

Although he will say goodbye to the episcopate at the end of the year, he will still have a number of duties, from the duties of chairman of the board of trustees of the Sapientia Foundation to the management of other running projects. In the meantime, it is a priority for him to spend more time with his grandchildren. During our conversation, he also revealed what he asked his family for his birthday.

Since we agreed on the interview, he has received one more award: the Grand Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit, awarded by the Hungarian President Katalin Novák. What it feels like?

To this day, I am constantly moving in areas that are not expected of a Reformed minister. I remember the very first award, the Gábor Bethlen award, which I received in Budapest in 1994. It was very honorable for me, because I believe and confess that I have carried Gábor Bethlen's vision of life all my life and I myself will carry it on. I will not list them in chronological order: then in Budapest I was able to receive the Fáy award, which is an award given by the OTP to the person who did the most for the culture of lending that year. Then I received the Wesselényi Award of the Romanian Hungarian Economic Society, then the European Citizen Award in Brussels.

This most recent one, the Grand Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit, is the highest Hungarian state award that can be given, and I feel that this completes the story.

When a person is 70 years old, I think they have said everything, left everything behind. However, I do not feel this is the end. It is a state, a station, that a person has reached the age of 70, but now a gate is opening in front of me, possibilities with which I have been less able to deal with until now, since the episcopal service is an extremely complex and difficult task, and every single one of life preoccupied at the moment. Even at night, when a person wakes up, he continues to think about some question. Nothing could have happened in the church district in the last 12 years, or rather in the last quarter of a century, since I was deputy bishop for 12 years before my bishopric, in which I would not have participated. As a bishop, on the other hand, the person is in the front, everything happens to him first, and it is a very difficult task to endure, process, and solve this.

This is only possible if one lives at the point of intersection, at the meeting point of the horizontal and the vertical, which means that one is always looking up, but also down at the same time.

I knew a lot of people who only looked up: they stumbled and fell because they didn't know what was actually happening in life. I know even more people who only move on the horizontal level, who want to acquire those things in life.

But where these two: the horizontal and the vertical meet, miracles are born, and I believe that this is what has been characteristic of my life.

At the moment when I preached in the church: I preached the Word to the people, but as I came out of the church, I dealt with all the issues that horizontally belong to human life, which we want to solve. During these years, there was not a single question to which I would have said that I don't care, let someone else do it.

The entire interview can be read on the Maszol.ro portal!

Featured image: Facebook page of the Transylvanian Reformed Church District