Budapest Sunday, September 17, during a massive open air Mass.
Pope Benedict XVI’s beatification proclamation for Salkahazi, who was martyred for sheltering Jews in a nunnery, was read out by Hungarian Cardinal Peter Erdo, Archbishop of Budapest-Esztergom.
While Catholics see this process as a first step to ‘sainthood’ Protestants and especially evangelical Christians have questioned the procedure, saying everyone accepting Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior has become a ‘saint’ in Christ.
Sunday’s beatification ceremony was held in front of St. Stephen’s Basilica and attended by about 10,000 Catholics, Hungarian news agency MTI estimated.
SOCIAL SISTERS
A journalist, writer and cultural activist by profession, Salkahazi joined the Sisters of Social Service, a charity organization and religious order helping the poor, in 1929.
The Sisters of Social Service saved over 1,000 Jews, including many women and children, in the final and hardest months of the Second World War. Of them, around one hundred were rescued by Salkahazi herself, according to historical records.
After her mission was reported to the authorities, Hungary’s ruling Arrow Cross, the Hungarian allies of the Nazis, drove her along with people she sheltered to the Danube River and shot them into the river on December 27, 1944.
FIRST CEREMONY
The beatification ceremony was the first in Hungary since 1083, when the country’s first King Stephen, his son, Imre, as well as Gellert, a bishop who played a key role in converting Magyars to Christianity, were beatified and canonized, MTI noted.
The Hungarian Holocaust claimed the lives of 600,000 Hungarian Jews and tens of thousands of Roma. Sunday’s ceremony came just two days after a memorial commemorating the victims of the Roma Holocaust was unveiled in Budapest’s Nehru Park Friday, September 15.
The three-meter high triangular monument carved in black granite symbolizes a crematorium chamber. Inside the chamber a tormented figure made of bronze can be seen through holes carved in the granite. At least over 3,000 Gypsies, who prefer to be known as Roma were killed in the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland on the night of August 2 in 1944.
