On the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, Minister of Defence Csaba Hende and several Hungarian pilgrims visited the battlefield of Isonzo and held a commemoration in the Hungarian cemetery on Saturday, September 13. The politician gave Pope Francis a gift of the Ministry of Defence, after the Head of the Catholic Church celebrated Mass in the military cemetery of Fogliano Redipuglia.
“The Pople started the Memorial Day in the Austro-Hungarian military cemetery, where he said a prayer for the dead war heroes of the one-time enemy buried there. In what followed, he went to Redipuglia, where the graves of more than 100,000 Italian troops – many of them unknown – are hidden inside an enormous catacomb, a huge memorial”, Csaba Hende told Hungarian News Agency MTI.
With this gesture, the Pope stood by “peace, international reconciliation and pacification. He talked about the same in his homily, based on the parable of Cain from the Old Testament”, Minister Hende added.
After the Mass, Csaba Hende personally met the Head of the Church and gave him a gift made by the Ministry of Defence. This gift is a small box which contains the prayer book and the case of the ID disc (dog tag) of a Hungarian soldier who is confirmed to have fought on the Italian front in World War I.
After the Mass, Minister Hende and the Hungarian pilgrims went to the Hungarian cemetery, where they commemorated the more than 7,000 Hungarian soldiers buried there, and also the altogether more than 600,000 Hungarian soldier victims of World War I, including those 250,000 Hungarian troops who had fallen on the fronts in Italy.
“Over the next four years, all countries that had been involved in the First World War will commemorate their heroes. In Hungary, we’re working to compile a full casualty list – mainly based on materials held in the Austrian War Archives in Vienna – because after World War II, for some unconceivable reason, all World War I registers of personnel losses were destroyed. We are now reconstructing them and will make the full list of names available on the internet”, Minister Hende said.
(MTI)
