Central Europe set model for world 450 years ago, says Hungarian parliament speaker

Central Europe set a model for the world 450 years ago which it could do this time around again, the Hungarian parliamentary speaker said in Turda (Torda), in western Romania, on Saturday. 

László Kövér addressed a ceremony marking the 450th anniversary of the Torda Edict, the very first law to declare freedom of religion.

Convened in 1568, the Diet of Torda issued an edict also known as Patent of Toleration as an early attempt to guarantee religious freedom in Christian Europe. Seen as a brave move toward religious toleration and a direct renunciation of national establishment of a single religion, the Edict of Torda legally applied to Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and Unitarians.

Kövér said at the ceremony that accepting the call of Transylvanian representatives, he would initiate that the Hungarian parliament declare January 13 a memorial day for religious freedom to mark the Torda Edict.

He said that

the errors committed in the 20th century must not be repeated again today.

“I call on all of us to live and realise our national self-identities and endeavours not against one another, but with the mission to strengthen one another, in the spirit of national fairness,” he said.

“We must believe in this notion even if the recent unprecedentedly harsh and irrational political attack at Transylvania’s Hungarian community seems to contradict it,” Kövér said, referring to recent remarks by the Romanian prime minister.