Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)
The Church of Perpetual Adoration, Queen Elizabeth Memorial Church, 1908
of the sacristy. It is here that a relic of St Stephen, the Holy Right Hand, has been kept since 1951, and it is from this chapel that the relic has once again been taken on a procession on 20 August every year since 1989. Before that the last post-war procession was led by Cardinal József Mindszenty as far back as 1947. In the course of the ongoing reconstruction of the church, bombs from World War II have been found and removed from the premises in quite recent times. The two world wars did not spare the bells in the belfries either. They were melted down and cast into cannons in World War I, while St. Imre’s bell was removed as a booty of war after the German occupation of the country in 1944. The new bell, which weighs 900 kilograms, was bought with money raised in Germany and cast in the Perner Brothers' foundry in Passau. (The relics of St. Stephen's wife, Blessed Gizella, princess of Bavaria, rest in the Niedernburg monastery in Passau.) The bell was shipped to Budapest on the Danube, and was consecrated on 20 August 1990 by Cardinal László Paskai, the country’s Prince Primate at the time. The church was granted the title of baiilica minor by the Holy See in 1931. Of the rights and obligations attendant on the title, the most important is that of granting plenary indulgences (indulgentia is the remission of a certain length of penalty for sins). On the tympanum of the architrave of the monumental main front is written a summary of the faith in the words of Christ addressed to the Apostle Thomas— Ego sum via, veritas et vita (I am the way, the truth, and the life, John 14.6). The Church of Perpetual Adoration, Queen Elizabeth Memorial Church, 1908 No. 75-77 Üllői út, District IX It ii a great sacrament indeed, / The one we must most devoutly worship / The one lefit to us by Jesus / In his testament; / Body and blood are present in it. (Hymn, 1797) The building intended to commemorate Queen Elizabeth, who was assassinated in 1898, was the first church of votive offering in Budapest. Its foundation stone was laid by the widowed Francis Joseph I on 18 May 1904. The invitation for the design tender produced a competition between two former disciples of Friedrich von Schmidt. (Schmidt, who had designed the Vienna City Hall, had also supervised the reconstruction of the neo-Romanesque cathedral of Pécs.) In the event, it was the neo-Gothic concept of Sándor Aigner (1854-1912) that carried 29
