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

"We are His home... ” (Heb. 3.6)

The church is the mysterious body of Christ, teaches St. Paul, the apostle of the heathens, in his first epistle written to the Corinthians (I Cor. 6.15, 12.27) and in another epistle to the Colossians (Col. 1.18). The apostle Peter, that rock upon which Christ has built his church (Matt. 16.16-19), professes, with the words of the Psalm (Psalm, 118.22) before the elders of Israel that Christ is the stone, set at nought by the builders, which is yet become the head of the corner (lapid angulam), and there is no "salvation in any other” (Acts 4.11-12). Christians, says St. Peter in his first letter, "as living stones, are built into a spiritual house” (domui ipiritualii, I Pet. 2.5—7) on the Lord. "Therefore ye are ... built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone,” as St. Paul sets forth in words to the same effect in his epistle to the Ephesians, "in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord”; templum sanctum in Domino (Eph. 2.19-22).

What is expressed in the image are primarily the spiritual aspects of construction. And yet, the physical actuality and interpretative spirituality of real buildings, raised for the celebration of the Eucharist as early as the first centuries A.D. (after Constantine adopted Christianity and made it a state religion), had a significance lying well beyond that of a mere house or edifice in terms of shape and character (the house of the congregation, domus ecclesiae). The church building anticipated a new, a celestial, Jerusalem as its terrestrial likeness. That idea took shape in the Book oft Revelation (Rev. 21) and then in the architectural policies of Constantine the Great, above all in the building of the basilicas of the Sacred Tomb—Resurrection (Anasthasis) and the Martyrion in Jerusalem (326—335,348 A.D.). There is a mutuality of effect between the functions and the significance of the church construction.

As is written in Paul's Cpistle to the Hebrews, after his crucifixion, Christ was not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are only the figures of the true (exemplaria verorum), but into heaven itself (Heb. 9.24). The church temporal (ecclesia) is a sign of the true one—as it was expressed in the Middle Ages.

St. Stephen, the apostolic king and founder of Hungary, decreed about a millennium ago that every group of ten villages should build a church (ecclesiam). Since then, Hungary had a long journey to travel down its trying history before Budapest’s network of parishes received its present shape.

At the turn of the 20th century, the deanery of Budapest comprised 17 parishes with 21 churches. Amidst an upsurge of patriotic and religious sentiment fol5