Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)

The Parisch Church of Blessed Özséb, 1987

The Parish Church of Blessed Özséb, 1987

Lékai László tér, Békásmegyer, District III "Succiia vireócit" (The motto of Cardinal László Lékai)

The only Hungarian religious order, the Pauline Order, was founded by Özséb around 1262-63. The main monastery of the order was in Budaszentlőrinc. (Otherwise, the order ran a monastery until 1951, on the slopes of Gellért Hill, Buda. Constructed in 1934 to plans by Károly Weichinger, the building was raised because a chapel of atonement, modelled on Lourdes, had been installed in a natural cave in 1925, where religious services were conducted by Pauline monks called back to Hungary from Poland, following their Franciscan brethren.)

The church was built on the border between the southern fringes of the large housing estates stretching towards the north of Buda and the garden city in the green belt. The history of its construction was recollected by the architect László Csaba (1924-95), who remembered that Cardinal Lékai (1910-86) had intended to "exchange" a government award he was meant to receive for permission to establish a new parish. The church-building prelate applied his motto, according to which "a [tree] pruned will blossom”, to the situation of the whole Catholic church of Hungary. And the Church did in fact correctly asses the opportunities offered by the "soft dictatorship” of the Kádár era in terms of his pastoral care among the population of the housing estates—a grey zone from

■ View ob the church from the ioutheait

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