Meet the conclave: Cardinal Péter Erdő

When Erdő was growing up in Budapest in the 1950s, Catholicism was barely tolerated by the communist regime

When Péter Erdő was growing up in Budapest in the 1950s, Catholicism was barely tolerated by Hungary’s communist regime. But despite official discouragement, the Erdő family prayed at home and went to church together. His father taught the family’s six children catechesis.

Caption: Cardinal Péter Erdő, pictured in Westminster Cathedral in London, England, in 2016. © Mazur/cbcew.org.uk.

Later, Erdő realized that his father, a jurist, and his mother, a teacher, were not allowed to practice their professions because they were deemed too religious.

His parents belonged to a Catholic family community led by a priest called Fr. Imre Mihalik, a gifted scholar whose academic career path was blocked by the authorities. Erdő’s parents helped to support the priest, who lived in a sublet, by sending their seven-year-old son to him for French lessons. At school, the boy also studied Russian and Latin. He later took private lessons in German and English, as well as developing proficiency in Spanish and Italian.

With this multilingual background, Erdő was ordained to the priesthood in 1975 in Budapest and asked to lead a parish in Dorog, a city northwest of Budapest. His predecessor in the parish had been conscripted as a soldier. Erdő’s duties included taking over the priest’s religion classes. The classes were not allowed to take place in the parish house, only in the church’s sacristy: a cold room barely heated by a stove that covered everything in a film of soot.

“On a rainy afternoon, maybe exactly due to the rain, only three children came to class,” Erdő recalled. “Suddenly, an inspector of the city council appeared. ‘Is that all of you?’ [he asked.] Hastily, he said goodbye. He almost pitied me. ‘He is hardly any danger to the public order,’ he probably noted to himself.”

After earning a theology doctorate, Erdő studied for a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University’s Institutum Utriusque Iuris in Rome. In the 1980s and 90s, he was a professor of theology and canon law in Hungary, and a visiting professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

In late 1999, when he was just 47, he was appointed an auxiliary bishop of Székesfehérvár, a diocese neighboring the Esztergom-Budapest archdiocese. His principal consecrator was Pope John Paul II, assisted by Archbishop Giovanni Battista Re, the future dean of the College of Cardinals.

Three years later, Erdő was named head of the archdiocese and Primate of Hungary. He was given the red hat months later, becoming one of the world’s youngest cardinals, at the age of 51.

Erdő’s influence began to extend far beyond Hungary after he was appointed president of the Council of Bishops’ Conferences of Europe in 2006, a post he held for a decade.

Pope Francis named the Hungarian cardinal as the relator general — a kind of lead coordinator — of the 2014-2015 family synods, which were roiled by a debate over the reception of Holy Communion by divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. Erdő gave an opening address at the 2015 session that was seen as a robust defense of the Church’s established position. While it’s difficult to discern the speech’s precise impact on the synods’ trajectory, it made the Hungarian cardinal a firm fixture on papabili lists.

Despite staking a bold conservative position, Erdő seemed to maintain good relations with Pope Francis. Hungary was one of the few countries the Argentine pontiff visited twice, briefly in 2021 for the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest and for three days in 2023.

Erdő’s homeland underwent a major transformation in 2010, with the election of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who launched an overhaul of the country’s constitution, media, judiciary, and immigration policies. Orbán’s party, Fidesz, channeled generous subsidies to dioceses, leading critics to accuse Fidesz of seeking to buy the Church’s silence on its most controversial initiatives — an assertion Church leaders reject.

The cardinal has a complex relationship with Orbán, a Calvinist who portrays Hungary as “an unbreachable bastion of Judeo-Christian culture in Europe.” Erdő reportedly criticized the government when it nationalized in vitro fertilization clinics in 2019, but seemed reluctant to wade into the debate over Fidesz’s hardline stance on migrants.

The Hungarian Catholic community, meanwhile, has faced demographic challenges. A 2022 census found that 2.6 million people identified as Latin Catholics out of a population of 9.6 million — almost half the 5.3 million recorded in 2001. (It’s essential to note that the religious affiliation question was optional and 40% of people taking part in the 2022 census declined to answer it.)

Hungary is also not immune to the priest shortage affecting Western European countries. Erdő attributes this partly to the deathly legacy of communism. Reflecting on the emergence of his priestly vocation in the Hungarian People’s Republic, he said his parents helped him to see that faith was the most essential thing in life.

“Hence, if faith is the most important thing in life, then serving the faith of others, passing on the faith, teaching the faith, and especially ministering at the liturgy, are the greatest things in life, the most important things one can do, and most useful, also for the salvation of others,” he reflected.

“This is the main motivation that I felt even as a boy.”