When Pope Francis lands in Budapest on Friday, Eduard Habsburg, Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See and a descendant of the defunct Habsburg dynasty that when dominated a lot of Europe, will greet him on the tarmac with a present.
The ambassador intends at hand the visiting pontiff a Spanish-Hungarian dictionary, persevering with a operating joke between the 2 males about how Hungarian is the language of heaven — as a result of it takes an eternity to be taught. “Begin now or do you want to wait for eternity?” Mr. Habsburg, 56, stated he deliberate to ask Francis. “He will love this.”
Mr. Habsburg, a deeply religious and conservative Roman Catholic aristocrat, got here into the job himself with what he known as “very rocky” Hungarian language expertise, a results of his upbringing in Munich, Venice and Austria. But after a profession as a zombie-movie screenwriter, cartoon producer, love-triangle novelist, anime fanatic, sci-fi geek and media character with monarchic sensibilities, the Hungarian authorities got here calling.
“Why? OK. That’s the same question I asked,” the amiable diplomat stated over espresso in his residence final week in Rome. “You’re a Habsburg,” he stated they advised him. “You will find respect in the Vatican if you go to Rome, because the Vatican still respects traditional families.”
Also, he added: “I’m simply a nice guy. I can get along with anybody.”
Mr. Habsburg is hoping that his congeniality will assist Francis get together with Hungary’s hard-right, anti-migrant, pro-Russian chief, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who he stated was “thrilled to bits” over the pope’s apostolic go to to Hungarian Catholics, though it additionally guarantees to highlight the tensions between the 2 leaders.
Mr. Habsburg has had a front-row seat to the unease of that relationship since he arrived at Vatican on the top of the migration disaster in 2015, when Francis was excoriating the constructing of partitions as unchristian and Mr. Orban was constructing a fence. Mr. Habsburg has sought to painting the Vatican and Hungary as being on the same, if not identical, web page by emphasizing points starting from the persecution of Christians to the protection of the normal household to the will for peace in Ukraine.
Central to his job has been constructing relationships on the Vatican and a rapport with Francis, who he describes as an “enigma.”
He stated it was well-known within the Vatican that Francis, who usually concluded remarks with an invite to “pray for me,” surreptitiously provides about conservatives, “I wonder whether he prays for me or against me.”
When Mr. Orban visited Francis within the Vatican final April, Mr. Habsburg, who’s proudly within the conservative Catholic class, advised the pope that he himself certainly prayed for him, and never towards him.
“Oh,” he recalled Francis saying with laughter. “Someone learned their lesson.”
Mr. Habsburg, tall with a full head of side-parted hair, appeared delighted that the pope’s journey coincided with the discharge of his newest ebook, “The Habsburg Way,” which options an introduction by Mr. Orban about how after Hungarians rose “against the Habsburg yoke,” he and his traditionalist ambassador had been “on the same side again, and we are going into battle together again.”
Mr. Habsburg, who doesn’t plan on the monarchy coming again — although “crazier things have happened” — ponders within the ebook “whether our lives, politics — indeed, our world — wouldn’t be better if we tried to do at least a few things ‘the Habsburg Way.’” Those methods are basically training Catholicism with “baroque piety,” having numerous youngsters in wedlock, seeing the upsides of empires, which “have gotten something of a bad rap,” dying properly and having “a memorable funeral.”
The Habsburg self-help suggestions within the ebook — additionally promoted on his Twitter feed the place he feedback on Habsburgs-in-history reputation contests (“Empress Maria Theresia, clearly beating Empress Zita”) — are a part of Mr. Habsburg’s method of each cherishing and buying and selling in on his heritage.
In the spectacular Santa Maria dell’Anima, as soon as the church of the Holy Roman Empire, he visited the relics of his distant relative Karl 1, the beatified Habsburg emperor, whom he reveres because the consummate household man and “really quite a star in our family.” He pointed on the gilded and stained glass double eagles that for hundreds of years served because the trademark of the empire after which his household, and that he used to process his 5 daughters and son with finding.
He introduced up his 2020 youngsters’s ebook, “Dubbie: The Double-Headed Eagle” (“Unfortunately so few people read it. People love to click on things but not to buy”) about an unsightly Habsburgian duckling that “hatches and has a double head — one optimist, the other cautious. He has to learn how to live with both.”
Mr. Habsburg’s résumé could also be unorthodox for a diplomat, however hanging round with popes is nothing new for the Habsburgs.
His maternal grandfather Karl, Prince Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg in Germany, was tight with Pius XII, the pope throughout World War II, and he knew subsequent popes. His paternal grandfather, Archduke Joseph Francis of Austria, fled Hungary in 1944, main his personal father to develop up in exile and converse English at residence along with his German mom.
Born and raised in Munich, he realized Italian in Venice, the place his father labored in textiles. Back in Munich, he developed a love of Latin and Greek; studying Stephen King; and writing brief tales, poems and ballads. “I was sort of the intellectual in the family,” he stated.
In 1980, his father introduced him for the primary time behind the Iron Curtain to Hungary, the place the key police “were nervous about Habsburgs coming back.” In 1989, a 12 months after he completed his army service, he boned up on the language with a monthlong crash course in Budapest.
He studied philosophy and historical past on the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany, and turned enamored with Thomas Aquinas, whose medieval philosophy impressed his thesis. He deepened his research on the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, the place his household had its roots going again to 950, and interviewed champions of the normal church, together with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who turned Benedict XVI.
“He told me my thesis should be made into a documentary or a thriller, like Dan Brown,” he stated. “He was really fun.”
In 1995, he married Baroness Maria Theresia von Gudenus — whose father had been Austrian ambassador to the Holy See and whose mom, a descendant of Archduke Johann of Austria, was Hungarian. “You know all the Catholic aristocrats are somehow related,” he stated.
After faculty, Mr. Habsburg labored for a youngsters’s tv firm in Germany and edited Pippi Longstocking cartoon scripts. He went on to supply the animated sequence “Nick and Perry” about “two aliens, but they look like dogs, so they have to pretend to be dogs.” His years in animation gave him a love of Japanese anime, he stated, declaring that his most profitable tweet was about “the fifth installment in the ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ science fiction series.”
“They can’t imagine that a Habsburg, from a royal family, loves anime,” he stated. “‘He’s a geek like us.’”
He moved along with his rising household to a rustic residence on the Danube in Austria to pursue his ardour for screenwriting. There, he wrote episodes of a TV sequence in regards to the police on the Danube River; discovered success with “The Christmas Dog,” a broad romantic comedy, and its sequel, “Two Christmas Dogs.” He optioned a “really good zombie movie set in Austria” and labored on a biopic in regards to the final week within the lifetime of his assassinated ancestor, Empress Sissi, married to Emperor Franz Joseph I.
His novels embody “a love triangle story through all of Europe” with “Catholic elements,” he stated.
To make ends meet, he discovered work as a spokesman for a conservative bishop in St. Pölten in Austria, and hosted a TV present about castles.
Soon after Francis turned pope in 2013, his father advised him to return to Hungary, the place the federal government thought he’d make a great ambassador.
Last week, Mr. Habsburg, whose cousin is now Hungary’s ambassador to France, joined dozens of different diplomats to the Holy See at an occasion contained in the courtyard of the Swiss Guards. He joked that he coated his eyes at a portray within the Swiss Guard’s headquarters of the 14th-century battles of Morgarten and Sempach, which helped bounce his household out of Switzerland.
As the speeches ended and the guards, of their Renaissance-style striped uniforms, started inhaling fondue and swilling Swiss wine, he politely bowed out to go residence.
“I have a family,” he stated.
Source: www.nytimes.com