A bishop AND a man. When does that happen?
In the terrible era of FrancisChurch there is yet an occasional bishop.
BUDAPEST — Pope Francis’s message Sunday couldn’t have been clearer: With hundreds of thousands of refugees flowing into Europe, Catholics across the continent had a moral duty to help by opening their churches, monasteries and homes as sanctuaries.
On Monday, the church’s spiritual leader for southern Hungary — scene of some of the heaviest migrant flows anywhere in Europe — had a message just as clear: His Holiness is wrong.
“They’re not refugees. This is an invasion,” said Bishop Laszlo Kiss-Rigo, whose dominion stretches across the southern reaches of this predominantly Catholic nation. “They come here with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ They want to take over.”
The bishop’s stark language reflects a broader spiritual struggle in Europe over how to respond to a burgeoning flow of predominantly Muslim men, women and children onto a largely Christian continent.
This language is so hopeless. Is it a ‘broad spiritual struggle’ to figure out how to respond? The fact that they are invading is in itself a broad spiritual loss! Struggle over. Time to lose.
Even as Catholics in other parts of Europe heeded the pope’s plea for help Monday, there was little evidence here that church leaders were prepared to elevate what has so far been an anemic response to one of the worst humanitarian crises Europe has seen in decades.
‘Anemic?’ I’d say the continent was bleeding profusely. What more does the Washington Post want from what’s left of Europe? We’re not there yet!
And despite the heat that Orban has taken worldwide for attempts to crack down on some of the globe’s most vulnerable people by halting their journeys or throwing them into prison, his stance has seemed to only burnish his reputation here as a no-nonsense nationalist who will defend the country against an onslaught of “tens of millions” of new arrivals.
“I’m in total agreement with the prime minister,” Kiss-Rigo said in an interview Monday.
The pope, by contrast, “doesn’t know the situation.”
The situation, as Kiss-Rigo describes it, is that Europe is being inundated by people who are posing as refugees but actually present a grave threat to the continent’s “Christian, universal values.”
Isn’t that comforting. At least the Archbishop is deferential enough to pretend that Francis doesn’t know these people aren’t refugees. Poor Pope Francis is just uninformed. That’s why on almost every single policy point he pushes the UN-Obama-EU-Castro-Islamist agenda. He just has a big heart and not much of a nose for news I guess.
Oh, wait. Francis doesn’t like abortion or euthanasia. He said it. He just likes handing the reins to it’s mass-murdering power brokers, that’s all. It’s a complex world and you want to be 100% consistently pro-life; pro-life in a way that really kills.
Even though the majority of migrants who have crossed the border in southern Hungary are from Syria — where war has claimed more than 320,000 lives in the past four years — he judged them unworthy of assistance because most of them “have money.”
They leave rubbish in their wake, he said, and refuse when offered food.
“Most of them behave in a way that is very arrogant and cynical,” said Kiss-Rigo, who has been bishop for nine years in an area that is home to some 800,000 Catholics.
Who does this Catholic bishop think he is making value judgments! You’re not supposed to call victim groups selfish people of low character. How is that even relevant? Next you’ll be knocking their holy religion. That’s not Christian!
Aid workers on the border and at Budapest’s central train station — where hundreds of refugees awaited trains Monday to Western Europe — gave a different account. They described people desperate for assistance and grateful to receive it.
Whew. Finally some honest information from government-sponsored aid groups. Well they would know, yes? And they’d be sure to tell the press if it weren’t so. It’s not like they’re paid to lie about it.