Pope Francis to visit Hungary

The visit was pushed back from 2020 when the entire congress was postponed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, he said.

The visit is “great joy for the conference and gives us hope and consolation in these hard times,” Erdo said. The “statio orbis” mass celebrated for the city and the world is the peak of the eucharistic congress, he said. “It is therefore fitting and customary” that the pope should attend it when taking part in the conference, he added.

The congress will be held between September 5 and 12, and will feature religious events, a conference, lectures and concerts.

Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony welcomed the news and said it was a “joy and honour” to host the pope in the city. He cited on Facebook the pope’s latest Encyclical as promoting a “popularism enabling individual development and focusing on human dignity, and protecting work as the most important aspect of social life” over populism, which “abuses its mandate to serve its own interests and to enrich itself”.

Karacsony noted that the pope had called for handling poverty locally, “through local councils and on a basis of solidarity and subsidiarity”.

The mayor noted he had been among those to issue an invitation to the pope to the original congress in 2020.