“The policy on protecting persecuted Christians and our insistence on preserving Christian values provide a stable spiritual foundation for Hungarian-American relations, which have arrived at a new chapter”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said on Friday in Washington in a statement to public media regarding his negotiations in the U.S. capital.

“It is in this spirit that Eximbank and the World Bank Group have agreed to finance technological and infrastructure investments in countries that are in a difficult situation, and which for this reason are the sources of migration processes”, he told the press. “It will be possible to reduce migration pressure via the investment projects they will be financing”, Mr. Szijjártó stressed.

He also announced that an agreement has been concluded between Hungary’s National University of Public Service and one of the largest Catholic universities in Washington, Marymount, with relation to the fact that courses about Hungary and Hungarian language courses will be held there. “The cooperation between the two universities is also about preserving Christian values and protecting Christian communities”, Mr. Szijjártó added.

He highlighted that the leaders of the two countries have a totally similar approach to the major dilemmas of global politics, and have “an absolutely identical approach” with relation to preserving Christian values and protecting Christian communities. In this spirit, on Friday the cooperation between the largest U.S. government aid organisation (USAID) and the Hungarian Government was reinforced with relation to acting together and increasing each other’s effectiveness during the course of supporting Christian communities in the Middle East.

The Council for National Policy, one of America’s leading Republican political communities, held a meeting in Washington during the course of the day, to which Péter Szijjártó was the only minister from a foreign country to be invited.

In his speech at the event, Mr. Szijjártó said hypocrisy is appearing to an increasing level in both European politics and on the global stage, and one of the elements of this is that “it is to all intents and purposes only possible to talk about Christianity, Christian values and the protection of Christian communities with a momentous amount of courage, whereas the norm would be for countries with Christian histories to talk about these things absolutely naturally”. “Christianity is the most persecuted religion on Earth; four out of every five people who are persecuted because of their religion are Christian”, Mr. Szijjártó explained. “We must not allow intolerance against Christianity in international public life to be catalogued as the last accepted form of discrimination, and it must be made clear that Christian communities are entitled to just as much international protection as other communities” he added.

(MTI)