Hungarian Conservative

Sixty years ago, began the most important event in the history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, the twenty-third ecumenical council…It will be the task of a generation to continue, in a rational and balanced way, to implement the teaching of Vatican II, which today is under a great deal of tension.

The idea of the human person as created in the image and likeness of God is mirrored in the modern concept of human dignity, as well as in the unconditional respect for human life—values that are subject to grave violations in today’s world. Europe should rely on this anthropology, embracing and protecting the image of the created person, and supporting its dignity as well as its natural communities in the 21st century.

‘The fact that Hungary has to fight like hell for its right to be normal is a sign of the times. So is the fact that in America, as in almost every Western country, the borders are a fiction, our heroes are hated, our free speech is taken away from us, scientists proclaim the desirability of sculpting the genitals of children into works of art—and these things barely make news. We have grown accustomed to decadence.’

‘Many Christians who hold modernity culpable for the demise of the church and dispersion of the Christian flock join forces with political conservatism, seeing in it their natural political ally and representative, while conservative politicians look upon these groups—and many of their institutional leaders, bishops, evangelists, theologians—as reliable, strong, and loyal supporters.’

‘The various proceedings and attacks against Hungary for years can not be traced back to rule-of-law issues or “democratic backsliding”, but “merely” to the fact that the domestic right-wing is fighting back against Wokeness—precisely in the wake of its triumphant victory.’

‘The US Constitution must be first and foremost interpreted via the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the ‘Creator’, as well as the ‘Laws of Nature and Nature’s God’—an archaic term developed by the Anglican clergyman in his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594), which equate to the natural law and God’s divine precepts.[1] John Locke, perhaps the philosopher who influenced the Founding Fathers, in his Two Treatises on Government, likewise identified the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God as God’s moral legislation inscribed in the heart of man. This is because man himself is by nature unable to know the divine moral directives such as doing good unto others.’

‘Only the West killed God, and they did it twice for good measure: once on the cross, and more recently via the Enlightenment project to transform the world through progress, secularism, and science, rendering religion either rational or irrelevant.’

May all penmen remember when they write their next article that the precise use of terms is the alpha and omega of all communication. And those who allow their words to be hijacked will fare ill—and they can only blame themselves.

While the supposed freedom of a materialistic culture will tend to undermine any sense of the sacred, we can be aware of the false idols and choose to tend to our souls. Scruton, indeed, left us a final work on this very topic.

The inherent dilemma regarding the rules of engagement in a just war is that they tend to become either vague or restrictive when military operations fail to achieve victory or a ceasefire leading to peace.

‘My whole life has always been guided by a sense of duty to my family. Now we might as well go home, but we wouldn’t be any happier there…Here we are part of our family and can help if needed. We live in a Hungarian community; we are happy here. If only we didn’t miss Hungary so much…’

For years, Hungary has been under regular attack from Brussels for allegedly failing to respect ‘European values’. It is worth examining these values to see if it is in any way wrong not to respect them in the way that the representatives of the liberal mainstream in the Western world expect, and whether our entire civilization should not instead perform a paradigm shift, radically transforming its values.

Protestantism has been inextricably intertwined with Hungarian national consciousness and thirst for freedom. The Hungarian Protestant Bible translators made the Scripture accessible to Hungarians in their mother tongue, and also contributed to the development and preservation of the language. Practising Protestantism was also in defiance of the Catholic Habsburgs and Austria: Protestants were willing to suffer martyrdom rather than renounce their faith, as the fate of the Hungarian Protestant galley slaves demonstrates.

‘When Marx explained the philosophical foundations of dialectical materialism, he first of all referred to the “development of the natural sciences”, just as the representatives of today’s New Atheist movements like to claim that “science has surpassed God” when explaining their theories.’

‘Christians no longer live by their own standards but by Christ’s, and since Jesus did not abolish the Law, the divine standards of morality, and therefore of sexuality, do not change with time or the spirit of the age.’

‘I thought, there is communism at home, half of the world is godless, they don’t know God or don’t consider Him important, and nobody wants to be a priest anymore… Thus, out of some kind of Hungarian defiance, I decided that I would become a priest.’

‘I strongly believe that we have to shake people up to make them feel Hungarian…That is why the stakes are as high in Hungary as they are here in America.’

The lack of humility, modesty, the lack of deference to one’s superiors, the lack of discipline and respect are the main causes of most of the political and sociological problems of modernity. After all, according to the blind believers of progress, sailing never ends. However, according to conservatives, there is no such thing as an island of Utopia. Their problem in politics is not the search for an island that doesn’t exist, but: ‘[h]ow to get the disgruntled crew to help keep the ship of the state afloat, to keep it from capsizing and being shipwrecked?’

At the exhibition at the Benedictine Abbey Museum in Tihany, open until 31 August, visitors can not only see Hungary’s first surviving original written document from 1055, but also learn about the historical circumstances of the abbey’s founding and its former operation.

In the noise of today’s egos and digital stimuli, the zeitgeist, i.e. the spirit of the age, leads us deeper and deeper into nothingness. However, there is still a narrow path—blessed are those who notice it.

‘J.R.R. Tolkien was an author, and Imre Makovecz was an architect. But while they may be divided by their crafts,

the two men were, I argue, united in spirit.

Both Tolkien and Makovecz saw in the modern world that something had gone awry; that something had been lost. Both figures knew that they could not resurrect the dead, or bring the long-lost past back to life, but they could reimagine it in a way particular to them and the unique talents they possessed.’

‘Looking at the stories, or the food, rituals and traditions surrounding them, Passover and Easter couldn’t be more different at first sight. But if we look closely, we can see that Passover and Easter are intimately linked on many levels.’

This article will present the reader with a basic understanding of the tragic but triumphant life of Whittaker Chambers, the man whose dramatic, twelve-word encounter with God and subsequent heroic exploits became the inspiration for a new generation of conservatives, like Ronald Reagan.

Learning how much we have already achieved during the past two millennia gives us strength, says Csaba Böjte. An interview about the foundations of European Christianity, childcare and the purpose of human life.

Even though The Innocence of Pontius Pilate by David Lloyd Dusenbury offers no mystic resolution of Pilate’s drama, the philosophical conclusions it draws from the trial of Jesus are indeed far-reaching.

‘God transcends His creation and He must be accepted as He has revealed Himself in Holy Writ. This means that it is not up to human beings to adapt its terminology to what is trendy or politically correct, especially if the substance of revealed truths, as we Christians—and I also speak as a Roman Catholic priest—hold dear, are altered.’

‘A major theme of the classical law is that the law should be stable over time and protect traditional expectations about how human life is arranged and how society is conducted. Liberalism by contrast is a doctrine of perpetual disruption and instability, constantly trying to find new frontiers by which traditional societies, and traditional morality can be disrupted.’