Pope Francis urged Hungarians to open their doors to others on Sunday at the end of a three-day visit.
Francis made the appeal from the banks of the Danube as he celebrated Mass on Budapest’s Kossuth Lajos Square.
“We, like Jesus, must become open doors. How sad and painful it is to see closed doors,” especially the “closed doors of our selfishness,” isolationism and indifference to the poor and the sick, he said at the Mass.
Tens of thousands of people attended Sunday’s Mass, including President Katalin Novak and Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orban. .
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.
“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.”
“It is a beautiful thing when borders do not represent boundaries that separate, but points of contact, and when believers in Christ emphasize first the charity that unites us, rather than the historical, cultural and religious differences that divide us.”
