Orando et collaborando

From servants of God to servants of the Monarch

The practice of the historical churches in twenty-first-century Hungary bears no resemblance whatsoever to the example set by Saint Elizabeth of Hungary — or any of the Saints of Hungary for that matter. I am not a Catholic; I have always had difficulties with accepting or even understanding the cult of saints. My deeply religious grandmother — a stubborn Calvinist who sent her children to Sunday school even in the years of state socialism — had me baptised in secret in order to avoid the wrath of my fiercely atheist father. Sunday school was most certainly out of the question, which, ironically, had its toll on my future to come.

Right after the fall of communism, it was just as difficult to find a proper school for secondary education in Eastern Hungary as it is today. Even a bit more difficult, perhaps, owing to the fact that no rankings existed to inform about the performance of the schools. My mother, who had learnt enough from both the stubbornness and the Sunday school, decided upon a well-known historical school of the Calvinist church in Debrecen.

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Orando et laborando — I still fall under the spell of these words at class reunions when I step into the first courtyard of the fortress-like campus founded in 1538. I don’t intend to go into details about how my parents hastily scraped together pastoral recommendation letters, how I completed confirmation classes privately in six months in order for my application to be accepted at the institution that had functioned, throughout the entire communist era, as the country’s one and only Calvinist high school. Nor will I explain how my mother managed to get her master plan past my devoutly atheist father, or how my elementary school headmaster’s fury looked like when I sufficiently passed the entrance exam that her son failed. I walked through the main gate of the historical building in utter enchantment on the 1st of September, 1991, even though I had no idea whatsoever, who Zacchaeus was and why he climbed the sycamore tree.

Back then, very few of us lacked religious upbringing completely. Even fewer compounded this by asking the religion teacher — nicknamed Batman among the students for the dramatic sweep of his cloak — if he could provide any evidence for Jesus having been a male. Without detailed elaboration, I must say that my question rested on the Scripture itself. If God created mankind in resemblance of his own image to be men and women, and the Father and the Son are of one essence (Council of Nicaea), then why comes the assumption that Jesus could have only been a man? I never got the answer, it might be the reason why I still wonder sometimes. Most of my classmates had at least one grandparent who was a presbyter at his church (stay focused, it is the state socialist era we are talking about), and many had ministers in their families. While students elsewhere were taking hesitant steps toward their first heartbreaks of teenage romances, adolescents at my school were competing over the authenticity of their ‘stories of religious conversion’.

Lacking any convincing narrative of my own conversion, I desperately tried to meet the expectations. The trickiest part of which proved to be the fact that I was unable to believe in the Church that seemed to operate far from the ideal it had been teaching about. For one thing I was of course dismissed from class for asking about the biological sex of Jesus. The headmistress of the girls’ dormitory constantly wanted me to be kicked out of school for seemingly no particular reason or so I thought. I didn’t have many sins to mention, except for the fact that my hair was blonde, which did not come in handy at the dawn of the peroxide craze. Owing to the strict school rules I was sitting in the principal’s office before the end of the first week of school. within the first week I was already sitting in the principal’s office. The dormitory headmistress demanded me to dye it back to brown immediately in alignment with the house rules. I tried to defend myself — in vane — saying that by the grace of the Almighty it happened to be my natural hair colour. After a few minutes of argument, I summoned some death-defying courage from who knows where and added: I will gladly dye it brown, but that won’t make it any less blond in reality. In the end, we left it at that.

Whatever happened with the historical Churches of Hungary in the Orbán-era roots deeply in the modus operandi they have always been working. Rules over mercy, discipline over acceptance, judgement over love, hierarchy above all. Zoltán Balog, the Presiding Bishop of the Synod, who supposedly arranged the presidential pardon for an accomplice of a predator who sexually harassed children in his care, was merely the icing on the cake — although the kind that’s hard to swallow. Instead of uplifting the decaying public schools, the Church, which in the eastern part of Hungary is almost exclusively the Calvinist Church simply takes the schools over — not to help integrate the poor or, horribile dictu, Roma children, but to ensure that the local middle class has somewhere to send theirs. Orando et collaborando. In exchange for buildings and property, they assume control — despite lacking expertise — of the broken child-protection system; saving the state from having to take responsibility. Orando et collaborando. They draw parallels from the pulpit between Christian-conservative values and the Orbán regime, indoctrinating those who are nevertheless keep visiting the house of God. Orando et collaborando. The most faithful followers systematically turn their backs in disgust on prostitutes, drug users, victims of domestic abuse, the desperately poor and the children suffering from brutal mistreatment both in their homes and in Church-run foster facilities. Collaboro necesse est?

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