Ladislav Nemet

Ladislav Nemet SVD (Serbian: Ладислав Немет, Hungarian: Német László; born 7 September 1956) is a Hungarian-Serbian prelate of the Catholic Church who has worked in Serbia as Archbishop of Belgrade since November 2022 and before that as the Bishop of Zrenjanin from 2008 to 2022. He is a member of the Society of the Divine Word (Verbites). He was made a cardinal on 7 December 2024 by Pope Francis.

Before becoming a bishop he was educated and filled positions in several countries, studying in Poland and Rome, working as a missionary and pastor in the Philippines, teaching and collaborating on the Vatican's diplomatic efforts in Austria, doing pastoral work and teaching in Croatia, and then taking on several assignments in Hungary. He has credited his time in Catholic countries such as Poland and the Philippines with strengthening him for work in his episcopal assignments where he is part of a religious minority. He has been the President of the International Episcopal Conference of Saints Cyril and Methodius since 2016.

Ladislav Nemet was born on 7 September 1956 in Odžaci, then in the People's Republic of Serbia, Yugoslavia, into a family of ethnic Hungarians, a significant group in the multi-ethnic Vojvodina province; Nemet refers to himself as a Hungarian. His role models were a local priest and an uncle who was secretly a Verbite in Hungary under the Communists, who recommended the order as a path to broader experience, telling Nemet that "a diocese is too small for you".

He attended the secondary school Gymnasium Paulinum in Subotica from 1971 to 1976. He joined the Society of the Divine Word, completed his studies in philosophy and theology in Pieniezno, Poland, and there took his perpetual vows on 8 September 1982. He received his master's degree from the Catholic University of Lublin on 7 April 1983. He was ordained a priest in Odžaci on 17 April 1983. He spent his first two years as a priest doing pastoral work in Croatia.

He studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome from 1985 to 1987. While there he worked in a parish in Fiumicino and was thrilled to experience a parish of young people with an average age of 35 and with many active community groups of a sort unknown in Yugoslavia. He worked as a missionary in the Philippines and a chaplain at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City from 1987 to 1990, He later said he learned how the shortage of priests meant that "the laity do much more for the church than the official structures", something "incomprehensible" to Europeans who are "bishop and priest focused".

He returned to Rome and obtained a doctorate in dogmatic theology from the Gregorian in 1994. He spent the next ten years in Austria. He taught dogmatic theology at the Philosophical-Theological College of St. Gabriel and was prefect of the theology students. From 1994 to 2003 he also supported pastoral efforts and was a chaplain at Maria Enzersdorf in Mödling. He worked for the Mission of the Holy See in Vienna at its representation to the United Nations and specialized agencies from 2000 to 2004 and at the same time taught as professor of Jesuit faculty of theology in Zagreb.

He was provincial of the Hungarian Province of the Verbites from February 2004 to May 2007. During that time he dealt successfully with health problems, including "deep vein thrombosis and lung disease". In July 2006 he became Secretary General of the Hungarian Catholic Bishops' Conference (HCBC) and taught missiology at the Sapientia College of Theology for Religious Orders in Budapest. As secretary of the HCBC, he defended his predecessor's description of the Hungarian government's repression of demonstrators marking the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in the fall of 2006 as "police terror and nihilism". He said it was reminiscent of what he witnessed as a student in Poland, when the Jaruzelski government crushed Solidarity and declared a state of emergency. He said he feared the neoliberal market economy ideology was "now beginning to threaten our country". During his years in Hungary, he worked as a pastor and celebrated Mass in the Croatian language for members of the Balkan diaspora. In addition to Hungarian and Serbian, he speaks English, German, Polish, Italian and Croatian.

On 23 April 2008, Pope Benedict XVI named him bishop of Zrenjanin in Serbia. He received his episcopal consecration on 5 July 2008 from Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Budapest, with Archbishop Juliusz Janusz, Apostolic Nuncio to Hungary, and Bishop László Huzsvár, his predecessor in Zrenjanin, as co-consecrators. The service was conducted principally in Hungarian; the other languages used were Bulgarian, Croatian, German, and Latin. Though this meant returning to the region of his birth in Serbia, he said he felt no attachment to it after 33 years away and could happily work anywhere.