Pope Francis urged compassion and washed the feet of 12 asylum seekers at the Italian reception centre when more than one million refugees and economic migrants poured into Europe a decade ago.
Cardinal Peter Erdo, the Hungarian Archbishop, was considered a competitor to succeed Francis, and he took a different approach: citing legal barriers, he ordered the doors of Hungary to be closed to immigration and said: “If we accept refugees, we will become smugglers of humanity.”
He turned his position after a audience with Francis, but he never received inflammatory messages from Hungarian populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban immigrants.
However, the episode shocked the liberals and kept the conservatives on their zealous ways of the pope. It helped establish the Cardinal Eldo, Archbishop of Estegom Badapstre, as the standard bucks of the internal strength of the Roman Catholic Church, who wanted to reverse what they thought they believed, because Francis overemphasized emotional gestures at the expense of rules and doctrines.
Cardinal Erdo’s multilingual and empowering is extensively written about the mysteries of the church’s legal system and dedicated much of his career to scholarships. He had little experience directly dealing with the daily problems of the churches except for two years as a parish pastor after his appointment in 1975.
This may confront the church when it faces the challenge of reversing the stable drift of European secularism.
“He is a lawyer, not a pastor,” said Istvan Gegeny, president of the Hungarian Foundation, a Hungarian organization of the Catholic news portal.
“Reasonably, he is a genius who can think of five different things at the same time, but he has never been close to people. He connects with them in a formal way, not emotional way,” he said.
Cardinal Erdo also has contacted many Cardinals who will choose the next pope. He is a familiar figure among Western Catholic leaders, and he served as chairman of the Bishops' Committee from 2006 to 2016, forming a powerful, though divided, voting group at the conference. He also built bridges with Catholic leaders in Latin America and Africa.
Like Poland's Pope John Paul II, who became the first pope in Eastern Europe in 1978, Cardinal Erdo, 72, entered the priest during his motherland's communist rule. It was a time of forced compromise and his prospects were impressed.
Some conservatives supported Cardinal Erdo's belief that he would return the church to the time of John Paul and his successor Pope Benedict XVI, a theologian of in-depth scholarship and sometimes doctrinal views and ended the progressive ideas of Francis.
But the Hungarian who worked with him said he was less than some fans believed. “He is a liberal conservative,” said Vigilia's editor Tibor Gorfol.,,,,, Official magazine of the Hungarian Church.
“He is not a real hard man” and “never directly criticized Pope Francis.”
Cardinal Erdo supported the reform of the Second Vatican Parliament in the 1960s, which sought to modernize the language used by the church in terms of services.
But he said he opposed allowing divorced Catholics to receive the communion and blessed gay couples. In a 2019 interview with Vatican magazine internal editor Robert Moynihan, Cardinal Erdo talked about the need to “guard the flame of traditional Christian faith” in an increasingly secular world.
In Hungary, however, Cardinal Erdo has not succeeded in slowing down the secular trend.
Cardinal Erdo was appointed Archbishop by John Paul in 2002, responsible for the decline in the number of Hungarians who declared his Roman Catholics. According to the official census results, this number fell by more than one million to 2.6 million between 2011 and 2022. This shocked the Hungarian Church and Mr. Orban, who touted Hungary as a bastion of Christian values.
Cardinal Erdo usually avoided getting involved in Hungary’s polarized politics, but in 2023 attended a picnic by senior figures in the Fides Party, which sparked anger. He has not yet defended the mistreatment movement of Francis to Fidesz during the European immigration crisis, frustrating liberal Hungarian Catholics.
Peter Marki-Zay, a Catholic mayor of a church who led the failure of the opposition movement in a 2022 general election, called Cardinal Erdo “the typical communist bishop of Hungary” and “will not stand on anything.”
Hungarian Catholic who worked with him said silence reflects his cautious personality and a desire to avoid confrontation with the government funded in the church.
Cardinal Erdo initially remained quiet in response to allegations of sexual abuse against a Catholic priest who said in 2003 that he was harassed as a child. Cardinal Eldo later suspended the priest.
“Silence is unfortunately the main strategy of the Hungarian Catholic Church,” said Mr. Gofour.
A spokesperson for Cardinal Erdo did not respond to a request for comment.
Budapest's partner Halmos contributed the report.
