Hungary: A Hollow Tolerance

When Hungary became the first Communist state to sign an agreement with the Vatican last September, it seemed as though the country’s 6,000,000 Roman Catholics had regained some small but significant freedoms. Then Communist Boss János Kádár ordered his security police to get on with enforcing his regime’s real policy toward religion: implacable enmity. If proof of that policy were needed, the Budapest Municipal Court has just supplied it with the trial and conviction of 13 priests on transparently flimsy charges of conspiring against the Communist system.

Subversive Catechism. Their crime was the “ideological destruction” of Hungary’s youth by teaching about Christ, possession of letters written in French about church music, and of such subversive literature as the Catholic catechism. Their sentences: from 2½ to eight years’ imprisonment.

Chief defendant was Father László Emödi, 45, former rector of Budapest’s Regnum Marianum Church, which was razed by the Reds in 1950 to make room for a huge statue of Stalin. Emödi was first imprisoned in 1961 for organizing religious instruction among children, but was later amnestied. Now he must serve out the four remaining years of his earlier jail sentence as well as five more years for his latest “relapse.” Also convicted: Father Alajos Werner, Hungary’s leading composer of religious music, who several years ago attended a congress of church music in France. He was given 2½ years in prison after the latest trials.

The courtroom dialogue sheds a revealing light on the quality of Hungarian justice:

Defense Counsel: The defendants are priests, and religious instruction is their priestly duty. It was not political work.

Judge: These arguments are incorrect because we are living in a society based on materialistic concepts. In our society, educating youth in the religious spirit amounts to politics.

Defense Counsel: And other priests? Why are they allowed to teach religion?

Judge: The law guarantees freedom of religion, and the teaching of religion is allowed by our [proCommunist] peace priests. But nobody can expect the state to entrust these functions to persons who by their behavior have shown themselves as sworn enemies of the state.

Arrests & Asylum. Kádár presumably got some propaganda mileage out of the Vatican pact, which allowed Pope Paul to appoint six Hungarian bishops of his own choosing. Hungary’s leader has given little in return. Though some Hungarian bishops have again been allowed to visit Rome, several hundred priests are still forbidden to officiate at holy services. With one minor exception, religious orders are outlawed. Two bishops are under house arrest in Hejce, and two others are banned from their dioceses. Hungary’s most famous symbol of opposition to Communism, Jósef Cardinal Mindszenty, who is now the only Catholic leader of his rank in Communist Europe still barred from the duties of his office, remains in secluded asylum in the U.S. legation in Budapest. He will not leave, he has always insisted, until freedom for his church becomes a reality.