HUNGARY: Tolling Bells

The Cominform had stated with blunt finality: “There is no place for the [Roman] Catholic church in the Balkans.” Hungary was not strictly Balkan, but it was in the Cominform orbit. Last week Hungary’s Communist government won a victory over Hungary’s Catholicism. In the midst of the fracas, trading punch for punch, was Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, a tough prelate in a tough spot.

Cardinal Mindszenty was 56, precise, ascetic. Guests at his dinners got such meager fare that they counted on picking up another meal afterward. His town house on Budapest’s Var Hill still showed bomb scars, and he lived in only two rooms of it. But Hungarian peasants understood his blunt speech. He told them to stop reading government newspapers and stop listening to the radio. In a pastoral letter he proclaimed: “To the bitter disgrace of this country, falsehood, deceit and terror were never greater . . .”

The immediate issue in Hungary was Communist Boss Matyas Rakosi’s order nationalizing the country’s 4,813 Catholic schools. In 1944, Mindszenty had been jailed for four months for his opposition to Naziism; now he was risking himself again. Through the Hungarian countryside he drove his own Alfa-Romeo at a dangerous pace from one mass meeting to another. After Communist police cut the power supply for his sound truck, he got his own portable generator. The government warned Hungarians not to listen, but the cardinal drew crowds of as many as 45,000.

For all his valiant fight, Mindszenty lost on the school issue last week. The Hungarian Parliament declared the parochial schools nationalized. Catholics could not alter the official decree, but they had ways of retorting. Across the land, at the cardinal’s order, church bells tolled a 15-minute requiem. In Budapest (before the police broke up their demonstration) women shouted: “Wait till September—our children will be taught at home.”