Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)
The Parish Church of All Saints, 1977
The Parish Church of All Saints, 1977 The corner of Németvölgyi út and Hegyalja út, Farkasrét, District XII "All iaintá of) God, pray for m." (From the Litany of Saints) All-Saints' Day (i November) is the feast day of all those who have been canonized but are not commemorated in the Catholic calendar. In practice it has become the vigil of All Souls' Day. The cemetery church of Farkasrét designed by Ferenc Módos and Virgil Ka- rassói (1936-38) and named after St. John perished in the siege of Budapest. Its ruins were turned into a columbarium. An important example of the "interior design” of Hungarian organic architecture was made here to plans by Imre Makovecz in 1977—the mortuary chapel of the cemetery. In Makovecz's own words, his "intention was to make it look like the inside of a human rib cage ... with the dead body laying where the heart would be.” The Christian believer may be reminded by the space here of the entrails of the great fish that swallowed the prophet Jonah, an event that Christ himself related to his own self, his own resurrection saying, "so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt. 12.40). The new church stands across from the main entrance to the cemetery, on the ruins of a tavern. Building work had to be carried out without disturbing the services held in the chapel arranged among the ruins. Needless to say, the construction had political repercussions in the 1970s, and permission from the State Office for Church Affairs had to be obtained. The authorities would only issue a permit for a site where a church building had originally stood, and the floor space of the new one was not supposed to exceed that of the old. (The previous church to be built in Budapest had been raised in Tövis utca, District II, as far back as 1948. The presbytery named after St. John of Capistrano was designed by Antal Say-Halász.) Work on this building started in 1975, in a controversial period in the history of Hungary's Catholic church. In 1971, Prince Primate József Mindszenty had left the country. The cardinal, who had been imprisoned in 1948 and who briefly regained freedom of movement and liberty to act in 1956, departed from the embassy of the United States of America after fifteen years of voluntary confinement there. In 1974 the Pope appointed László Lékai, the commissioner of the church, apostolic guardian and then, in 1976, made him the successor of Mindszenty, who had died the previous year. 69
