It is our joint responsibility to ensure that, from the financial grants and opportunities provided, culture and above all, a community should be built and should gain in strength in Transcarpathia, Minister of Human Capacities Zoltán Balog said on Saturday in Nagydobrony in the Ungvár District at the family quiet day of the Reformed Church in Transcarpathia.
In his lecture entitled The Reformation of Our Lives – A Path to Blessing at the event attended by some seven thousand persons which was organised under the motto Reformation – On the Path of Blessing for 500 Years, he stressed: he has experienced a great many times in life what strength the greeting Blessing and Peace has. This is the starting point because by virtue of the fact that we have received peace and we have blessing, we can go very far, he added. In Reformed Church communities we are used to speaking based on a text, and the guideline of this lecture should therefore be the text: For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God (the Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians), he continued.
As he reminded his audience, in 2011, upon the passage of the Fundamental Law, the goal was to create sound foundations, and therefore, as he said, the Constitution begins with the name of God for a reason, namely with the sentence: God bless the Hungarians. Only a handful of nations have such a Constitution because if we write the name of God at the beginning of a text, it must have consequences, it must serve as a yardstick, he reiterated, remarking: if we want to find our way in the affairs of the Hungarian community, this is where we should reach for help.
In this context, the Minister cited the passage of the Fundamental Law, based on which Hungary bears responsibility for the fate of the Hungarians living beyond the borders, pointing out the significant difference between the expression „bear responsibility” and the expression used in the previous Constitution „feel responsible”. „If you feel it, you should also bear it – and this means blessing because those who feel it must also bear it, those who believe it must also profess it, and those who profess it must act accordingly”, he highlighted the correlation between the two expressions which, as he said, constitutes the essence of the Reformed faith. „It is there in the Hungarian Constitution, that which was not there before: we promise to preserve the intellectual and spiritual unity of our nation torn apart in the storms of the last century”, he highlighted, pointing out that he, too, was attending the most significant event of the Reformed Church of Transcarpathia “not just in order to preserve this intellectual and spiritual unity, but to also feel it and bear it, and to draw energy from it”.
In reference to the practical part of the reinforcement of intellectual and spiritual unity, Mr Balog said: “I sincerely hope that the Hungarians in Transcarpathia also feel in light of the ever increasing financial support received from the motherland that we feel our responsibility, and we love the Hungarians of Transcarpathia”.
The Minister stressed that the Hungarian community in Transcarpathia which now finds itself in a difficult situation needs this help today more than ever before. “It is our joint responsibility to ensure that, from the financial grants and opportunities provided, culture and above all, a community should be built and should gain in strength in Transcarpathia”, the Minister pointed out, highlighting: “the Christian faith and our national affiliation are our common values”.
In answer to a question of the Hungarian news agency MTI, Mr Balog said regarding the significance of the most important event of the Reformed Church in Transcarpathia: the family quiet days organised annually are very important because they reinforce the community and the sensation of belonging together. “In Nagydobrony I witnessed a very strong Reformed Church community, it is touching, and even moving the way the people sing, the way they address hundreds of children. This, too, demonstrates that in a truly difficult situation people are looking for hope in the best possible place, in the strength of the community”. He added: “it is our duty and obligation to ensure that this is not just some vain hope, but should be based on actual facts, and we are doing everything we can so that Transcarpathia should remain a liveable place for the Hungarians also in the future”.
As part of the family day event, the Minister of Human Capacities opened the exhibition Soli Deo Gloria: Five Centuries of Hungarian Reformation in the Nagydobrony Reformed church.