Hungary Helps Persecuted Christians

On Tuesday in Budapest, I paid a visit to Tristan Azbej, Hungary’s State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians and for the Hungary Helps Program at the Prime Minister’s Office. Can you believe that Hungary has an entire ministry dedicated to helping persecuted Christians? It’s the only one like it in the world. This is an initiative of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is a Calvinist. Azbej is a Catholic, and so is his friend Bertalan Kiss, who met me at the gate of the ministry. Kiss is the government’s Senior Political Advisor on Church Relations.

The first thing the men did was take me to the basement of the secretariat, to see the austere chapel, built in what had been a storage room. Here it is:

What a remarkable space — and in a government building, too. But they are definitely doing the Lord’s work there. Azbej took me into his office upstairs. He has mementoes all over from the places he’s been taking aid from Hungary to hurting Christians and others — for example, Yazidis persecuted by ISIS, Rohingya Muslims persecuted by Myanman, and Sephardic Jews suffering in Yemen. Said Azbej, “Helping only Christians wouldn’t be very Christian.”

I asked Azbej which was his most valuable memento. He pointed to this photo from a Catholic church in Iraq, on the Nineveh Plain. ISIS destroyed the church when they invaded, and desecrated Christian graves. After ISIS was driven out, Hungary rebuilt the church, and poured aid into the village to get it back on its feet. The grateful people of the town renamed their village to include “Hungary” in its name (I can’t remember precisely, but I think Azbej told us that the people added the phrase “daughter of Hungary” to the name of their town).

This picture was of the first baptisms that took place in the town, in their rebuilt church. Thirteen souls became Christians that day, thanks in part to the generosity of the people of Hungary: