Lutheran leader: Christians should take position on issues of public life

Seeing social injustice Jesus spoke “firmly and to the point”, which gives the power to Christians today to “take a position on issues of public life individually or as a church”, Bishop Tamás Fabiny, head of the Hungarian Lutheran Church, told MTI on Tuesday.

Fabiny, at the same time, warned against “short circuits” of tying those positions to one or the other political party.

Referring to the 30th anniversary of Hungary’s democratic transition, the bishop said that Hungary’s churches had “not done too well” in dismantling the communist regime, and said in both the Nazi and communist regimes the churches “were often adrift” and were bent on meeting the requirements of the political system of the time.

“Learning from mistakes of the past we should have the courage to act and raise our voices,” he said.

In the current system, churches depend on financing from central coffers, but “believers should be made aware” that the “degree of independence from the state is partly determined by their readiness to donate”, the bishop said.

Fabiny suggested that

central budget regulations were “unpredictable”, and “churches may often feel that they receive support to the detriment of another church;

when one gets financing the other won’t” and warned against rivalry between church organisations. It is important to realise that “prosperity of one church will make another richer, too”. “Prosperity for the churches is prosperity for the country” and vice versa, he said.