Bishop of Szeged-Csanád
Bishop László Kiss-Rigó, Bishop of Szeged-Csanád, was born on April 6, 1955, in Budapest. He spent his childhood in India, where his father worked as an engineer, and attended a Salesian institute for his middle schooling, completing his secondary education at the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor secondary school in Budapest. After two years of military service he began his studies in 1976 at the theological college of Esztergom and continued from 1978 at the Central Seminary of Budapest, and he was ordained a priest on June 14, 1981. In 1982 he defended his doctoral thesis in theology at the Pázmány Péter Academy of Theology in Budapest and began his pastoral work in the parish of Szécsény, and in 1983 he was transferred to the parish of St. Vincent de Paul in Budapest. From 1983 to 1985 he was a scholar of the Pontifical Hungarian Institute in Rome, taking a licentiate in canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University and attending courses in the New Testament at the Pontifical Biblical Institute as an extraordinary student. From 1985 he was curate and from 1997 parish priest of the parish of St. Anne at Esztergom. In 1986 he was appointed a professor of the theological college of Esztergom and from 2003 its director general, and from 1998 he has also taught at the faculty of humanities of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University. From 1991 to 2004 he was director of the Catholic school authority of the Archdiocese of Esztergom-Budapest, and in 1994 Pope John Paul II conferred on him the title of papal chaplain. On January 24, 2004, he was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Esztergom-Budapest and Titular Bishop of Pudentiana, and at the same time episcopal vicar for the region of Esztergom. He received episcopal ordination on February 21, 2004, at Esztergom, with Péter Erdő as principal consecrator and László Pacifik Paskai and Juliusz Janusz as co-consecrators. On June 20, 2006, he was appointed Bishop of Szeged-Csanád, and he was installed on August 26, 2006, as the ninety-fifth bishop of that see. His episcopal motto is Virtus, dilectio, sobrietas.