A year or two ago I speculated about whether Pope Francis had intended a snub to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by only visiting his country very briefly. It seems I was wrong because the Holy Father has been enjoying a rather longer stay in Hungary in the last few days.
Part of his agenda was a speech at the former Carmelite monastery that now houses the office of the Prime Minister.
Francis took the opportunity to criticise what he called “ideological colonisation”, by which he means the attempt by richer, Western countries to use their economic and cultural power to subvert more traditional societies.
This is done, for example, by the USA or the EU including abortion provision in the building of medical facilities in the developing world, or by their making aid contingent on liberal approaches to sexuality and gender-related issues. In another sphere it is achieved through social media, films and TV shows, especially those aimed at children, whose imaginations are waiting to be formed. Occasionally pictures appear in the press of American embassies flying the pride flag, in its various iterations, alongside or even in place of the stars and stripes.
Hungary was an apt place for Francis to make this argument for the government in Budapest has itself been the target of this form of soft imperialism. The State Department in Washington DC provide funding for “civil society” groups in Hungary, for example. Such groups are actively seeking to overturn Orbán’s heavy restrictions on LGBT campaigning and activism, mounting the same kinds of attacks on marriage, family and healthy sexual attitudes that have ravaged other Western countries.
Brussels, too, has sought to put pressure on Orbán, by repeatedly threatening to withdraw particular forms of funding from Hungary unless they toe the line on transgenderism and gay issues. Strikingly, Orbán has done relatively little to restrict abortion in Hungary, despite his focus on raising birth rates and sustaining traditional Hungarian society.
As ever, it is not as simple as saying that individual countries or transnational institutions should never seek to spread values and moral ideals around the world. The Catholic Church is after all a transnational institution, and we Catholics can hardly avoid the charge of seeking to proselytise for a particular worldview.
It is, as ever, about content. It was good for Christians to spread out across the world bearing the teachings of Christ because those teachings are true and right. They are in harmony with the underlying nature of the world, by their nature. The kind of ideologies to which Francis was referring are quite the opposite – they are false and damaging. They will not bring unity and health to the societies which adopt them, but strife, discord and dissolution. Just look at what has happened in Western societies during the last half century: divorce, abortion, gender madness, and the war on real marriage have created millions of lost, miserable, alienated people.
The Pope is right to call out the arrogance and foolishness that lies behind the secular elites’ social engineering. It is our task to set out an alternative – what an old priest acquaintance of mine calls “the civilisation of love”.
(Pope Francis on his latest visit to Hungary | CNA)
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