BUDAPEST, Hungary — Pope Francis urged Hungarians to open their doors to others on Sunday, as he wrapped up a weekend visit with a plea for Europe to welcome migrants and the poor and for an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Francis issued the appeal from the banks of the Danube as he celebrated Mass on Budapest’s Kossuth Lajos Square, with the Hungarian Parliament and Budapest’s famed Chain Bridge as a backdrop. The celebration provided the visual highlight of Francis’ three-day visit that has been dominated by the Vatican’s concern for the plight of migrants and the war in neighboring Ukraine.
Citing local organizers, the Vatican said some 50,000 people attended the Mass, more than 30,000 of them in the square, on a brilliantly sunny spring morning. Among them were President Katalin Novak and Hungary’s right-wing populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, whose lukewarm support for Ukraine has rankled fellow European Union members.
Francis has expressed appreciation for Hungary’s recent welcome of Ukrainian refugees. But he has challenged Orban’s hard-line anti-immigration policies, which in 2015-2016 included building a razor wire fence on the border with Serbia to stop people from entering. Upon arrival, Francis urged Hungary and Europe as a whole to welcome those who are fleeing war, poverty and climate change, calling for safe and legal migration corridors.
“How sad and painful it is to see closed doors,” Francis said in his Sunday homily on the Danube. “The closed doors of our selfishness with regard to others; the closed doors of our individualism amid a society of growing isolation; the closed doors of our indifference towards the underprivileged and those who suffer; the doors we close towards those who are foreign or unlike us, towards migrants or the poor.
“Please, let us open those doors!” he said.
In a final prayer at the end of the Mass, Francis prayed for peace in Ukraine and “a future of hope, not war; a future full of cradles, not tombs; a world of brothers and sisters, not walls.”
The 86-year-old Francis has tried to forge a diplomatic balancing act in his pleas to end Russia’s war, expressing solidarity with Ukrainians while keeping the door open to dialogue with Moscow. On Saturday, he prayed with Ukrainian refugees and then met with an envoy of Russian Patriarch Kirill, who has firmly supported Moscow’s invasion. and justified it as a metaphysical battle against the liberal West.
