This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer.
Their tongue is as an arrow shot out: it speaketh deceit: one speaketh peaceably to his neighbour with his mouth, but in heart he layeth his wait
Jeremiah 9:8
Sometimes even a hardboiled observer of Hungary can be surprised by what is possible in a member country of EU. I had to write one year ago about antisemitism inside the Catholic and the Reformed Churches of Hungary[1]. But usually I do not look into Hungarian Catholic or Reformed Church website. A leaflet of the neo-Arrow Cross party Jobbik distributed in Budapest – an invitation to the ceremony of the installation of a cross on a big place in the centre of Buda, part of Budapest, on the western side of the Danube – sent to me by snail mail not only astonished me, but made me curious. Could it be that a catholic priest is peddling explicit racism? Could it be that a Calvinist bishop gives a speech at such an event?
The answer is an unequivocal YES.
The organizer of his event, dean Antal é Musits organized this event according the leaflet. So I looked into the website of his church [2] and I found the mentioned Jobbik leaflet in jpg [3]. On this Jobbik leaflet peddled by dean Musits I found the following sentence:
“The society of Christian gentlemen is expecting people of our race with hot tea with rum.”
(A Keresztény Úriemberek Társasága forró, rumos teával várja a magunkfajtákat.”)
In order to understand exactly what this means, one should know that the word ‘Christian’ in this Hungarian context means not a member of a Christian church, but non-Jewish. The word ‘magunkfajta’ is based on the word ‘faj’ which means ‘race’. The word ‘fajta’ has more than one meaning, it means ‘of our kind’, but also ’somebody of our race’. In the context of a Jobbik leaflet ‘magunkfajta’ means our race.
I thought I’d surprise a Hungarian Catholic in my acquaintance with this news, but he told me that in Hungary it is not uncommon for Catholic bishops to promote, in church and usually implicitly, the political right-wing party Fidesz, and even Jobbik. A Catholic priest peddling in Budapest a racist leaflet on the web site of his church did not surprise him. Cistercian monk Ákos Előd Brückner declared that Hungarians should feel proud to have such organisations as Jobbik. This is not surprising either.
I am not amazed by the fact that a Bishop of the Calvinist church is speaking at an event organized and promoted by racist and antisemitic Jobbik. After all I had to write several times about Lóránt Hegedüs junior, who also racist and antisemitic, and appears at the events of the infamous Hungarian Guard [4].
So I did some research on this bishop. Tamás Csuka is a Bishop of the Reformed Church and a retired brigadier (formerly chief pastor of the Hungarian Army) and as of September 2009, still active in his church [5]. Bishop Csuka consecrated the flags of the Hungarian Guards [6] and gave an antisemitic speech at this gathering in Budapest on November 28.
I wrote in 2007: “The violence is a particular concern in view of Jobbik’s belief that the coalition “should not be able to finish its term”, which ends in 2010″.
To collaborate with a racist party when violence is rampant is a dangerous policy. The Catholic and Reformed Churches feel the need to declare publicly their antagonism to racism and at the same time to be “realistic” and cater for that a substantial part of their members who are racist and antisemitic.
They do SPEAK OUT OF BOTH SIDES OF THEIR MOUTH, to the world they say “We are against racism” but in Hungary, by promoting the political business of the right and extreme right more or less implicitly, church dignitaries signal that racism and antisemitism are acceptable for believers.
1) http://www.hurryupharry.net/2009/07/26/hungary%E2%80%99s-biased-justice/
http://blog.z-word.com/2008/10/the-cosmopolitan-parasite-class-antisemitism-in-hungary/
2) Szent Imre Plébánia: http://www.szentimre.hu/archives/1455
3) http://www.szentimre.hu/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/keresztallitas.jpg
4) see 1
5) http://www.reformatus.hu/archiv/2009/folytat_hirek.php?cikk=1249299678
6) http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=210
As far as I am informed, the Hungarian ministry of defence did not take action against Tamás Csuka. K.P.
http://esbalogh.typepad.com/hungarianspectrum/2007/08/th-hungarian-gu.html