Kata Molnár-Bánffy: „Conservatism is not guarding the past, but the future”

- Last year, you received the Families Award from the Minister for Families, Katalin Novák, in recognition of your work for the Képmás magazine and the Media for Families Foundation, and for your outstanding professional work on behalf of families. What were your thoughts at the time?

- This recognition is for the whole creative community, as it is teamwork at Képmás Publishing and the Media for the Family Foundation. The award also shows us that the work we do is a real gap-filler. The Media for the Family Foundation was founded 15 years ago by the staff of Képmás because they noticed, and research confirmed, that in the media the word ’family’ is used in a negative context in two out of three cases, mainly in the context of domestic violence. We started to consciously present the family in a positive context, using new tools, so with this award for media staff we also wanted to promote classical, conservative values.

– You were born in Budapest, but both sides of your family come from Transylvania. What lessons did you bring from home?

– I have six siblings, and I am the oldest. In such a large family, you are given a survival toolkit to help you cope in all areas of life. We were raised by our parents with religious, conservative values, we attended Catholic high schools, even before the change of regime. I was given parenting tasks and responsibilities quite early on, the technical term for this is parentification, and it is not easy to deal with its consequences, but I can see the benefits of it now.

And it's great that my siblings and I have formed a great little tribal alliance as we've reached adulthood, we like each other.

– Resolute, determined, responsible, ambitious, fierce, and brave - these are the words that come to my mind when I look at you. Were you like that as a child, too?

– Yes, I bring that from my childhood. Along with the notion that I've been trying to take responsibility for everything ever since. I put my own needs in the background if I have to, or I don't even articulate them, and I find it hard to say no. And when they do come up, my needs, they often do so violently. I have worked on myself for several years with the help of a professional to change all this, and I am proud to have been on this journey of self-development because I have started to live a more joyful life of much better quality through the therapeutic process. And when I am balanced and feel good, it has an impact on my colleagues, my children and my spouse. So it's worth fighting for your own well-being.

– You are the owner-manager of the agency Salt Communications, and you are also the managing director of the publishing house Képmás Publishers. Previously, you worked as a communications consultant in the Prime Minister's Office and managed the sponsorship business of the MOL Group. How did you and do you manage to combine all these tasks with family life and raising three children?

- Now that our kids have entered adolescence, it's a bit easier. But even before that, my husband and I found a way to balance work and family. Many people think of the work-life balance as a seesaw, and believe that if one side is up, the other must necessarily be down.

Image

Kata Molnár-Bánffy Photo: Tamás Páczai

I experience the opposite in my own life: if I have a flow experience at work, it is also very good for our family life.

- What do you think is the best thing about becoming a parent?

- Being a parent is an honour and a great gift from God. I have learned the most about life from my children. My above-average autonomous personality went through many changes when I became a mother - I was faced with tasks (such as childhood illnesses) that were out of my control. This made me feel desperate at first, and then I had to learn to deal with these situations with a lot of humility, and I became much stronger as a result. I am confident that, if not perfect, I could and can continue to be a good enough parent to my children.

- I know that you love hiking, for example, last year you and your husband walked from Budapest to Csíksomlyó, a total distance of 815 kilometres.

- Hiking and pilgrimage are not the same thing: last year we made this long journey as a pilgrimage, not for the pleasure of relaxation. It was a great experience for both of us, physically too, of course, but mainly spiritually and mentally. By the way, there are two things apart from my family and my work that give me deep pleasure: hiking and my vegetable garden. This year, my husband and I decided to hike the highest peaks of all the Hungarian mountains together, and by now, there aren’t many left. As for the vegetable garden, I am very proud of it. Every evening I go down to the garden, see how it's growing, pick a bunch of vegetables and eat them for dinner. I confess that I post about my vegetables on my Instagram page regularly, because for me, my garden and being partly self-sufficient is a huge experience, a great joy. A friend of mine found it strange that other people share photos of their kids and I share my potatoes and green beans.

- Going back to the magazine Képmás, which is very much concerned with the family, the concept of family and the subject itself has become very politicised. Doesn't that put you off?

- Képmás magazine and the Media for Families Foundation existed and promoted the importance of the family long before the issue became part of domestic politics.

On the one hand, we are pleased that the issue has entered the political arena, because it shows that there are figures in the political arena who recognise the importance of the family and are doing everything they can to strengthen it. On the other hand, it can also be counterproductive: if a political community makes a value its slogan, it can scare off social groups that do not identify with that political community but could identify with that value. This is what is happening with the family. Our work and our efforts for the family, for Christian conservative values, have been recognised by the government, but we do not do this work because of that recognition, but we do it because we believe that the family as an institution is good. Because it is so obvious to us, we have not learned to defend this essential institution, but now that it is under so much attack, we must learn to speak about it well and credibly to help those too who are discouraged by political slogans.

Image

Kata Molnár-Bánffy Photo: Tamás Páczai

- Képmás magazine has grown into a serious and high-quality brand, seen by many as an example.

- I am very happy about that. The magazine is about to turn twenty years old, it has grown from a parish magazine, and has been running in its current form for ten years. It was then that István Nagy, a designer with whom we also work at Salt Communications, designed its current form and image. Képmás is not a public affairs journal, but rather a cultural and family magazine in a broader sense. It is one of the few magazines where an article passes through several filters: we have an editor, a reader's editor and a proofreader. In addition to the quality of the content, we also pay a lot of attention to the quality of the visuals: each page is designed by a highly qualified graphic designer, and the photos and graphics are not just illustrations, but the visual world is part of the content.

So we believe in traditional quality, and we value our readers so much that we strive to give them the best we can.

- The "brother" of the Képmas magazine, kepmas.hu, has also evolved a lot: in the last two and a half years it has turned from a small marketing site into a portal with millions of visitors per month.

- We have a lot of work in this, and we still can't sit back. Our online platform is updated daily with fresh, original content, and we also regularly publish articles from our archives. It's not easy to find journalists for this job who are striving for quality as much as the Image itself. Today, journalism has lost its reputation and practically anyone can be a journalist if they claim to be one. Many people think that writing a newspaper is easy, but a real journalist knows that a good article is a hard, multi-day job. So let me send a word from here: anyone who feels that they meet the values of Képmás and the criteria of quality journalism is welcome.

- "One can and is free to be a Christian conservative. Even if there is a violent communication of this being not OK constantly pushed upon us, not only in Hungary but around the world. We have learnt to accept that others see the world through different eyes - and we can safely expect the same from them:  to look at our values with respect. It is, after all, based on the natural and on the rules of thousands of years of human coexistence." I have quoted this passage from a recent post on your Facebook page. Why did you feel the need to write this?

- It was meant as a kind of encouragement, because I see a crowd of people having second thoughts, especially conservative intellectuals. An image is beginning to emerge around the world that it is not modern, or even unacceptable, to believe in Christian values. Yet conservatism is not a guardian of the past, but of the future. Moreover, there is the issue of gender, which addresses morals and morality, too.  As if it were immoral to think, for example, that there are men and women in the world.

It is as if our desires carry as much weight as reality: the gender ideology movements have no respect for the created world.

It’s no longer just about that there are social sexes alongside the biological sex, but that the biological sexes are beginning to be completely negated, as if biology could lose its modernity. With this post, I was suggesting that we have no reason to have second thoughts about our own values, even if political communication deliberately camps us. Let us keep our values firmly in mind, let us distance ourselves from political parties. Let us be bold in expressing what we believe in, because in doing so we help each other.