“Following a forced break of several decades, the Church school system is now in its renaissance”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Saturday in the protestant church of Kunszentmiklós at the ceremonial opening of the renovated Sándor Baksay Reformed Secondary and Primary School and the inauguration of the building’s new wing.
The Prime Minister stressed that in 2010, when the national government entered office, 119 thousand children from kindergarten to secondary school age studied in Church schools, and their numbers had grown to 195 thousand by 2014.
He pointed out that “from the first Benedictine school to the protestant colleges and today’s education institutions”, the Church school system “has given the nation so many good Hungarians and good experts, scientists, priests, pastors, soldiers, mothers and fathers”.
It is no accident that in Reformed Church tradition school is often called the flower garden of the Church, he said, adding that we have no intention of abandoning this tradition in future.
According to the Prime Minister, what the Church is capable of doing to care for the poor, the downtrodden and the sick, to raise the young and to preserve and nurture Hungarian culture, and especially the Hungarian language, is something that the Hungarian people of the 21st century need as least as much as our forefathers did. Not to mention today’s troubled Europe, he added.
The Prime Minister referred to the school’s wing, which was built in 1960 and has now been demolished, “which did not prove to be lasting and hardly survived longer than socialism”. Mr. Orbán spoke about the fact that in addition to construction materials, the new building required a plan that included everything that 21st century modern technology makes possible, while at the same time complementing everything that is already present and has been proven successful. “These two things together are the epitome of the reformation”, he said.
According to the Prime Minister, the foundations have been the same for the past two thousand years for every community that calls itself Christian.
“It’s not a principle, not a system if ideas and not an ideology, but an individual and the relationship with him”, Mr. Orbán said, adding that although this is a living relationship, we must still search for new paths and still need new inspiration.
According to the Prime Minister, the challenge for the Hungarians of the early 21st century is whether we are capable of preserving everything that we have inherited from one thousand years of Hungarian history, culture, knowledge and wisdom in such a way that we can build a future on it.
Mr. Orbán recalled Hungarian history, during the course of which “we often had to stand our ground alone, in place of others, without being understood”. We also had to stand our ground to protect some “who perhaps didn’t even know and didn’t believe that there was a need for that resistance”, he added.
“Church schools preserve and innovate; they provide 21st century knowledge and skills, which they base on centuries of accumulated knowledge”, he said. Mr. Orbán closed his speech in Latin with the motto Soli Deo Gloria - Praise be only to God.
Bishop István Bogárdi Szabó gave a sermon during mass in the protestant church, after which Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Attila Szolnoki, the school’s Headmaster, cut the tricolour ribbon in front of the new school wing.