In his most recent Angelus prayer, Pope Francis asked the faithful for spiritual support for his journey to Hungary and Slovakia beginning on Sunday.

He entrusted his visits "to the intercession of so many heroic confessors of the faith" who, in these countries, had "testified to the Gospel in the midst of hostility and persecution," said the Pope in St. Peter's Square.

The Pope expresses the request that people pray for him before each trip abroad.

Matthias Rüb

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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Stephan Löwenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

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Niklas Zimmermann

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The trip to the closing mass of the Eucharistic World Congress in Budapest this Sunday and the subsequent three-day visit to Slovakia are anything but routine for the 84-year-old Pope, who is in the ninth year of his pontificate.

After his visit to Iraq in March, Francis is traveling abroad for the second time under pandemic conditions.

And for the first time since his serious bowel operation at the beginning of July, he is taking on the rigors of a multi-day flight trip - with five stations and ten speeches in four days.

The two capitals Budapest and Bratislava are of course only about an hour and a half flight from Rome, and the Catholic majorities also imply a home game for Francis.

In fact, the Pope is embarking on a journey on which he has to avoid numerous pitfalls, particularly of a political nature.

In both countries, Francis is associated with a liberal attitude towards migrants, homosexuals and other minority groups.

This runs counter to the political majority opinion in Hungary and Slovakia and leads to astonishment even among Catholics.

Francis wants to meet Orbán after all

Officially, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made a good face when it became known that Pope Francis would more or less limit his long-announced visit to Hungary to the closing mass of the World Eucharistic Congress, which addresses the importance of the Sacrament of the Eucharist in the missionary and goes in the life of believers. Although it is rather the exception that a Pope takes part in the congress, which takes place every four years, media reports indicate resentment. At the end of August, Orbán traveled to Rome for a networking meeting of Catholic parliamentarians. There he apparently tried his hand at party political partner search. A photo with him and Giorgia Meloni, the chairman of the post-fascist party Fratelli d'Italia, is circulating on the net.

The Hungarian head of government himself is a Calvinist. The Protestants are a minority, but for historical and cultural reasons they are well represented in the political elite. Orbán's wife Anikó Lévai, on the other hand, is considered to be pronounced Catholic, as is Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén, chairman of the Christian Democratic People's Party KDNP, which is closely related to Orbán's Fidesz party. Lévai and Semjén took part in the opening mass of the congress on Budapest's Heroes' Square, as did President János Áder and various members of the government, but not Orbán. After all, Francis is supposed to meet the Prime Minister on Sunday in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. At the beginning of June, the media spread that the Pope did not want to meet Orbán or President Áder.