Péter Erdő’s Papal Candidacy
Alex Faludy ponders the record of the Hungarian Cardinal tipped as a possible successor to Pope Francis.
Cardinal Péter Erdő (72), the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest since 2003, has emerged as a leading contender to be chosen to succeed Pope Francis at the conclave which begins in Rome tomorrow. Erdő enjoys strong support among conservative cardinals from the US and Africa, though he may face opposition from more liberal European colleagues.
This conclave is exceptionally hard to ‘call’. That’s because Francis’s appointments bucked the historic trend (which favours archbishops of major sees) by elevating so many prelates ‘from the margins’ to be cardinals. These were bishops from remote locations, some —e.g., Mongolia— with only tiny Catholic populations. We don’t know much about many of these electors, and its likely that Francis didn’t either.
Predictions that a college dominated (80%) by appointees of a liberal pope will guarantee a liberal succession are therefore suspect. In any case, there’s no straight line between a pope’s own preferences and the behaviour of ‘his’ cardinals: the College that elected Francis, perhaps the most radically progressive pope in modern times, was appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Both were notably conservative.
There are reasons to worry about the idea of an Erdő papacy, given the muted nature of his response to Hungary’s illiberal turn post-2010. Erdő has been silent in the face of rampant corruption, destruction of the rule of law, the criminalisation of homelessness, curtailment of freedom of religion or belief, dehumanising hate campaigns against Fidesz’s political opponents and, even more, both migrants and members of the LGBT+ community.
It’s unexceptional for a Catholic bishop to have more conservative views than the woman or man in the street: it’s kind of his job. What isn’t ok however, is for a bishop to collude, by act or omission, with those who assault the human dignity of vulnerable groups. The wording of Fidesz’s 2021 anti-LGBT+ legislation, incidentally, associated the act with the churches by specifying that material “promoting homosexuality” could not be displayed or sold within a 200-metre radius of church buildings.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (para. 2358) says that homosexuals “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided”. Similar imperatives apply re protecting the human dignity of migrants and the destitute —as various Vatican documents make clear. Erdő has failed these tests.
The April 2022 general election took place in conjunction with a referendum on LGBT+ issues designed to mobilise Fidesz voters. Ahead of the poll Erdő, together with Hungary’s other Catholic bishops, endorsed a statement on heterosexual marriage that declared it “the foundation of human dignity.” The idea for the communication is understood to have come from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Theologically, the assertion was incoherent. According to Christian teaching, human dignity derives unconditionally from humanity’s status as being made “in the image of God” and from God's incarnation in Jesus as “the Word made flesh.” According to the statement’s logic, however, not only would homosexuals seem to lack ‘human dignity’ but likewise Jesus himself (famously unmarried). The same would go for celibate Catholic priests.
To some of us at least, this text gave a worrying indication of how far the Hungarian episcopate was willing to go in sacrificing Christian doctrine to Fidesz’s electoral interests.
The wider context
A persistent refrain in my conversations with Hungarian clergy and lay intellectuals is that Erdő isn’t simply Orbán’s man inside the Church.” This is said by people critical of the cardinal and frustrated with Catholicism’s intertwining with Hungary’s governing party.
Their view is that (unlike some other bishops) Erdő is no ‘true believer’ in Fidesz. Rather, he started with a pragmatic approach: seeking the ‘best deal’ for the Church he could get, but then got out of his depth. By degrees, however, he’s become ‘boxed-in’ and lacks the courage to change course: he’s ‘weak’, not ‘bad’. His hesitancy, they say, comes from fear of endangering the network of Catholic social, educational and healthcare institutions created post-2010.
This network has helped the Church recover some of the public importance which it lost through Communist-era confiscations. Looking at the fate of the (dissident) Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship adds plausibility to this theory. HEF’s institutional network has been largely dismantled and HEF itself now teeters on the edge of collapse.
The ‘boxed-in’ explanation contains a significant part of the truth but, arguably, not all of it. I’ll come back to that later. First, though it is important to sketch some background.
The reason why the ‘boxed-in’ view has traction stems from resentment at incomplete property restitution post-89. This left the Church aggrieved and open to partnerships which might resolve the perceived injustice. Clergy also claim that the 2002-2010 Socialist-Liberal government reneged on commitments on the funding of Church schools contained in the inter-state treaty between Hungary and the Vatican (1997).
Pursuing amicable relations with a, notionally, centre-right government post-2010 was therefore inevitable. The problem is that what began as a transactional relationship progressively ceased to be so because the Church, and especially Erdő, lost bargaining power through two converging factors.
1) Fidesz’s hegemonic consolidation of power reduced the room for manoeuvre of all civic actors.
2) A very particular relationship of dependence developed between the Church and the state.
Government outsourcing of social functions to the Church was not accompanied —as many had hoped— with the gift of significant income-generating assets. The Church recovered some prestige through its new role in delivering public services, but became reliant on state funding to sustain them. Worse, increasingly, it needed help to maintain even its core operations, including paying clergy stipends.
Lavish grants for building projects, including the construction or renewal of 3000+ churches (both Catholic and Protestant), not to mention glistening new parish halls and heritage centres, create an impression of wealth and flourishing. But this is illusory: historic churches depend overwhelmingly on public subsidies.
The latter is estimated at 1.4% of GDP (nearly 20% of the state budget) once support for church-run social and educational services is included. Church schools, incidentally, are thought to be funded at a ratio of 3:1 compared to secular ones; the Catholic church enjoys the lion’s share.
Here we encounter two more interlocking ironies.
A) Church support strengthened Fidesz’s electoral position in smaller towns and rural areas. Yet, the more the party consolidated its illiberal state capture, the less bargaining power the Church enjoyed as a hedge against political rivals.
B) The greater the state’s largesse the less the faithful themselves felt inclined to support the Church financially, either through the 1% tax contribution or Sunday giving (“the Church has enough money —why should I give it more?” Decline in grass-roots giving further weakens the Church’s bargaining power with the state as it has fewer autonomous resources to draw on.
The latter scenario is worsening thanks to Hungary’s economic decline. People have less spare money to give to their parishes. Some at least can also be expected to resent the exemption from personal income tax enjoyed by priests (introduced by Orbán’s first government, 1998-2002).
Influencing the Conclave?
Erdő’s decision in September 2023 to attend the ‘Kötcse Picnic’ occasioned much comment, including criticism from some Catholics. Kötcse, it should be explained, is the annual closed-doors gathering for Fidesz insiders and trusted allies at which Orbán delivers an off-record address about the party’s policy direction.
The move was surprising because hitherto, Erdő observed certain decencies in maintaining distance between himself and Fidesz. Unlike some other bishops and priests, he had e.g., not identified himself with Fidesz’s satellite Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) —described by its leader, deputy PM Zsolt Semjén, as “the political arm of the Catholic Church in Hungary”. Indeed, over the years, there were signs of uneasiness about Erdő’s public relationship with Fidesz.
As President of the Hungarain Catholic Bishops’ Conference (2005-2015), Erdő was sometimes problematic for the government. He didn’t want to let the property issue go and Fidesz had no intention of resolving it to the Church’s satisfaction. He resisted introducing compulsory religious education classes in state schools, predicting that they’d have a damaging impact on parish youth groups. He even criticised the quality of the material on religion in textbooks for the alternative, secular, ethics curriculum devised by government experts.
So, when Erdő turned up at Kötcse in 2023, it was genuinely surprising to many. In truth, he looked a bit surprised to be there himself, blinking in the sunshine and wearing an unbuttoned white shirt sans clerical collar, not his usual black one. It was almost as if he felt embarrassed and distanced his presence at Kötcse from his normal persona.
The scene recalled Kádár-era pictures of Catholic bishops at gatherings of the ‘Hazafias Népfront’ (Patriotic People’s Front/ HNF). HNF was an umbrella stretching out beyond the MSZMP (Communist Party) to cover the tolerated, or just simulated, vestiges of independent Hungarian civil society: trade unions, interest groups, church leaders and some token non-Communist intellectuals. Participants didn’t have to join MSZMP, but they accepted the leading role of the Party in Hungarian life.
Bishops who weren’t stooge ‘peace priests’ sometimes felt compelled to turn up at HNF meetings and to be photographed doing so. In exchange, they could continue their pastoral work unharassed, send ordination candidates to seminary and obtain permits to repair collapsing buildings. These included Erdő’s own mentor Cardinal László Lékai (1910-1985) who, interestingly, also shed his normal clerical garb when doing so in March 1981.
The Lékai parallel lent an air of apparent pathos to Erdő’s Kötcse appearance. Seemingly, the Church had become so much a prisoner of the party-state that its primate had, once again, been reduced to performative abasement.
Sadly however, by degrees a different, if blurry, image has begun to emerge from behind the news footage.
In July 2024, while delivering his annual set-piece policy speech at Fidesz’s summer camp at Băile Tușnad (Romania), Orbán signalled his own concern with Erdő’s election. Citing a number of historical diplomatic missteps from which Hungary should learn lessons, Orbán included the country’s failure in 1513 to secure the election of Hungarian papal-candidate Tamás Bakócz. This prompted obvious questions about the example’s contemporary relevance.
Fidesz communications signal support for Erdő’s candidacy. Church affairs are known to be a ‘restricted topic’ for Fidesz-controlled media: journalists require special clearance to write on them. In recent years, each time Erdő’s possible election has been mentioned in the foreign press, this has immediately been reported by such outlets as a news item in its own right. This Hungarian reporting of foreign coverage is then amplified in English on the websites of Fidesz-organised ‘civil’ organisations.
Erdő’s candidacy may also have been boosted by the 2021 International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest, attended by several hundred bishops and cardinals from around the world. This congress gave Erdő’ a platform to impress peers and make connections. It was funded by the Hungarian state at a cost of about 80 million euros.
Lately, Hungary has hosted a number of individual visits by cardinal electors (and potential electors) attending conferences and events at a frequency surprising given the country’s size and location. Program costs for such visits are underwritten by government bodies.
Erdő’s papal election would present a number of concerns. Possibly though, should he emerge on to the balcony overlooking St.Peter’s Square later this week, nothing would be more worrying than the means used to propel him thence.
Alex Faludy
One might wish that the cardinal's failures to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable had been set out in more detail, particularly regarding refugees. Nonetheless an essay very worth reading -- thank you