His body responded well to the treatment, the pope said. He definitely wants to stick to his trip to World Youth Day in Lisbon in August, and trips to Marseille in southern France and Mongolia are also planned.
The fact that the head of the Catholic Church is in poor health also became clear during the visit to Hungary, during which Francis moved around in a wheelchair because of persistent knee pain. Regardless, the pontiff appeared to be in good shape.
Migration was one of the central themes of the Pope’s trip to the Eastern European EU country, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban has advocated a strict policy of isolation since he took office in 2010. However, since the Russian war of aggression began, Hungary has allowed more than two million Ukrainians into the country. During his stay in Budapest, Francis met some of them on Saturday and thanked Hungary for hosting the refugees.
At an open-air mass in front of 50,000 people on Sunday, Francis called on the faithful to be more open and brotherly. “Be open doors,” asked the Pope. He prayed for the “tormented Ukrainian people” and for the Russian people and called for “peace and a future of hope and not of war for the younger generations, a future of cradles and not of graves, a world of… brotherhood and not of walls.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Orban repeated the Pope’s words on his Facebook page on Sunday: “We need peace, a world full of cradles and not full of graves,” Orban wrote, calling for peace talks to end the war in Ukraine at the negotiating table.
At the end of his visit, Pope Francis gave a speech at the Catholic University in Budapest on Sunday afternoon to representatives of culture and science. In the early evening he started his journey home to Rome.
It was the Pope’s 41st trip abroad since he took office in 2013 and his second visit to Hungary. 39 percent of the country’s 9.7 million inhabitants are Catholic.
