Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)
The Hungarian Church of the Holy Land, 1949
believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned" (Mk. 16.16). Honorary provost Pál Bozsik, the first priest of the community, who commissioned the building, died in the prisons of the State Security Authority in 1952 at a time Lajos Shvoy, the Bishop of Székesfehérvár, who consecrated the church on 29 June 1943, was under house arrest. Walking further up Máriaremetei út, we arrive at the Mary shrine of Remete. Built to designs by Ferenc Schömer and consecrated in 1899, this neo-Gothic pilgrim church standing on the site of a 19th century devotional chapel was designated a ba&ilica minor by Pope John Paul II in 1991. The Hungarian Church of the Holy Land, 1949 No. 3-5 Heinrich István utca, District II "The Lord doth build up Jeru&alem. ” (Psalm 147.2) From the early Middle Ages, pilgrims to Jerusalem founded chapels of the Holy Tomb to keep relics brought back from the Holy Land. They were modelled on the Anastasis rotunda, the round mausoleum that incorporated the cave shrine of Jesus. It was an idea of Pater Mór Majsai, organiser of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, that a pilgrims' shrine to exhibit replicas of the devotional sites in the Holy Land be built in Hungary. Majsai commissioned Farkas Molnár (1897-1945), a Bau- haus-trained architect, to prepare designs for the shrine. In 1938 Molnár travelled to Palestine to survey the shrines there. In terms of groundplan all of these are oval in shape, centring upon a single focal point. That arrangement is then embraced by chancels recounting the major episodes in Jesus's life on earth in chronological order, including the Annunciation (Nazareth), the chancel of the visit of the Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, the place of Nativity, the cave in Bethlehem, the scene of the marriage of Cana, the transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor, the hall of the Last Supper, Golgotha, and the cave where the Sacred Cross was recovered. Ten chapels, the "spatial replicas" - eventually to encircle the central space radially. The envisaged covering involved an elliptic-parabolic dome made of reinforced concrete, which was regarded as a novelty at the time, its structure being engineered by István Menyhárd (1902-69). Even in the last version of the design, Molnár kept his earlier notion of placing the Holy Tomb in the 67
