At the beginning of his article, Rod Dreher says that he is surprised that Hungary is the only country in the world with an entire ministry dedicated to helping persecuted Christians. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, is a Calvinist, and the issue of Christian persecution is a priority for him. That is why the State Secretary, Tristan Azbej, reports personally to him and not to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, even if Christian persecution logically belongs in the foreign ministry.

On Tuesday, Rod Dreher was received by Tristan Azbej, State Secretary, and Bertalan Kiss, the government’s Senior Political Advisor on Church Relations. He was first led to the basement of the secretariat to see the austere chapel, built in a storage room. Tristan Azbej told his guest that they regularly have Mass in the chapel for those in the secretariat who want to come. He and Bertalan Kiss begin each day’s work singing lauds there.

After the chapel, they went to Azbej’s office that is full of mementoes brought back from places that he has visited as part of the Hungary Helps humanitarian visits. In the office, Dreher asked the Hungarian State Secretary which memento was the most meaningful for him. 

“He pointed to this photo from a Catholic church in Iraq, on the Nineveh Plain. ISIS destroyed the church when they invaded and desecrated Christian graves. After ISIS was driven out, Hungary rebuilt the church and poured aid into the village to get it back on its feet. The grateful people of the town renamed their village to include “Hungary” in its name (I can’t remember precisely, but I think Azbej told us that the people added the phrase “daughter of Hungary” to the name of their town)”, Dreher writes.

Tristan Azbej also told his guest that the issue of Christian persecution is extremely important because the western world prefers presenting Christians as the oppressors instead of the suppressed. That is why they try to explain the genocide of Christians with climate change and tribal conflicts.

Azbej related a personal experience with a high-ranking Western diplomat. He said:

“When I explained about the genocide committed by Boko Haram against Nigerian Christians, he told me it wasn’t religious persecution. This was near the beginning of my appointment, so I was really shocked. Do you know what he told me the cause was? Climate change. He said it was farmer-herder conflict caused by climate change.

“I explained the reports and the testimonies we received on the ground,” Azbej continued. “Herders are indeed attacking farmers, but the herders are all jihadists who get weapons and funding from al Qaeda. We had numerous testimonies of them overrunning villages and burning Christians inside their churches. We had a report where they burned alive 150 Christian martyrs inside their church, then they razed the church to the ground and built a mosque instead. But the Western diplomat kept insisting it was climate change.”

In the building of the State Secretariat, and especially in its chapel, Dreher remarked that the people are not only working for a government but ” they are definitely doing the Lord’s work there.”

This feeling was confirmed when Azbej himself said about his work:

“We don’t look at this work as a government policy, we look at this as something from above.”

You can read the original article here.

Photo credit: The American conservative