VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) At an official audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican today, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán underscored the importance of the family.
“All of us here in Rome, in the Vatican, and in Budapest,” Orbán said after the audience, “think that the family is the most important community of our times. The last refuge and the safest harbor for man in this modern world is the family. This is why we must mobilize all our efforts to protect and strengthen this most important human community in our modern age, and we can count on the Holy Father in this endeavor.”
Pope Francis received the prime minister today for a 40-minute audience in the Apostolic Library. In addition to speaking about efforts to support the family, Orbán said they talked about working for peace and the plight of refugees from Ukraine fleeing to Hungary.
According to Hungarian news agency Hungary today, after the audience Orbán spoke to reporters about the country’s relief operation of the 640,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine. He said, “We are conducting the largest humanitarian operation of all time, for which we are receiving recognition and respect the world over.” He mentioned that Pope Francis “encouraged us not to give up this good habit of ours.”
Orbán recently won a landslide re-election victory for a fourth term of office on April 3. “The entire world can see that our brand of Christian democratic, conservative, patriotic politics has won,” Orbán said to supporters upon his re-election.
“We are sending Europe a message that this is not the past – this is the future, our common European future.”
As LifeSiteNews has previously reported, last year Hungary passed the Child Protection Law, which bans the promotion of homosexuality, “transgenderism,” and pornographic materials to minors in schools, and cracks down on pedophilia.
Orbán has long supported policies and legislation that assists and promotes families. At the end of 2021, Hungary had raised its birth rate to the highest it has been in 27 years, largely attributed to decades-long pro-family policies of Orbán and his administration.
Bence Rétvári, the Hungarian deputy state secretary of the ministry of human resources and member of the Christian Democratic Party (KDNP), told Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet at the time, “We strongly believe in families, so we have done everything in the last decade to help families have children … and improve their standards of living.”