Foreign minister discusses protection of Christian communities in Washington

Hungary’s policy of protecting Christian communities and insistence on preserving Christian values provides a stable basis for its relations with the United States, the foreign minister said after talks in Washington on Friday.

Hungary’s Eximbank has therefore reached an agreement with the World Bank Group to finance technological and infrastructural investment projects in countries facing hardship and which have thereby become migrant-sending nations, Péter Szijjártó told Hungarian public media. The projects will help ease migration pressure, he said.

As regards higher education, Szijjártó said Budapest’s National Public Service University has reached a deal with the Roman Catholic Marymount University on the latter launching programmes taught in Hungarian and about Hungary.

The collaboration of the two universities will also be about preserving Christian values and protecting Christian communities, he added.

He said the two countries’ leaders had similar approaches to major global political issues and “the exact same approach” when it comes to the preservation of Christian values and the protection of Christian communities.

In acknowledgement of these shared views, he said, the Hungarian government and the US government’s aid agency USAID have strengthened their collaboration in the aiding of Middle Eastern Christian communities.

Meanwhile, Szijjártó said he was the only minister of a foreign country to be invited on Friday to a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a networking group for conservative activists.

Recounting his address to the meeting, Szijjarto said that as in European politics, hypocrisy was becoming more and more prevalent on the global political stage, too. One element of this, the minister said, was that “it takes tremendous courage to talk about Christianity, Christian values and the protection of Christian communities, when it should be natural for countries with a Christian history to talk about these things.”

Szijjártó said Christianity was the most persecuted religion in the world, arguing that four out of five people persecuted for their beliefs today were Christians. He said the world should not allow discrimination against Christians to be considered “the last acceptable form of discrimination”, adding that it should be made clear that, like all other communities, Christian communities are also entitled to international protection.

Source: MTI