Religion: Coexistence in Hungary?

With full Vatican approval, but no direct Vatican participation, the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary has been carrying on negotiations with the country’s Red regime. Last week came word of a limited arrangement for coexistence.

The talks turned in part on Hungary’s collaborationist clergy, organized as the “National Committee of Priests for Peace.” The group included only 300 of Hungary’s 6,000 priests, but with government backing it was in virtual charge of the Hungarian church in the years before last fall’s uprising. After his release from imprisonment, Cardinal Mindszenty threatened all “peace priests” with excommunication unless they submitted to church discipline. Most of them submitted. Notable exception: Father Richard Horvath, the National Committee’s ambitious chief. Horvath went on riding high after the Kadar regime was installed by Red tanks. In January the Vatican excommunicated Horvath (for “plotting against the legitimate authorities of the church”), decreed automatic excommunication to all other priests who followed him. The Kadar regime fumed, imprisoned two bishops in reprisal. But last week the Vatican announced that Horvath has since “implored the Holy See for absolution and has declared himself repentant for his faults,” whereupon the excommunication was lifted.

At the same time the Kadar government promised its “benevolence” toward the church, particularly concerning the right to teach. The church, for its part, pledged support of a new organization called Labor for Peace to replace Horvath’s old National Committee. The new organization will include the peace priests, but also Hungary’s bishops and other clergy untainted by past collaboration. The two bishops imprisoned in retaliation against the excommunication decree will be released.

Kadarj also offered Mindszenty safe-conduct to the frontier from his hideout in the American embassy, but the cardinal refused, not trusting Kadar’s word. Some Vatican officials believe that if Mindszenty were to leave the embassy, it would mean imprisonment, and perhaps death. “The only question is,” mused one Vatican insider last week, “should he choose this martyrdom? It would be the supreme fulfillment of his sacred mission. But he cannot offer himself egoistically. It is a question of practical timing and of holy vocation. He cannot submit himself until he himself feels that martyrdom will not unduly afflict his people, and that it is truly the will of God.”

Before getting ready to return to Poland and his own precarious balancing act with the Reds, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski last week formally accepted his titular Roman church (a parish in Rome is traditionally allocated to every cardinal). The squalid neighborhood surrounding the medieval Santa Maria in Trastevere is heavily Communist, but it turned out to give him Rome’s biggest welcome to any cardinal within memory. From the altar Wyszynski asked for the peoples’ prayers “for myself and for my poor martyred country. Poland has always been, is still today, and always will be the outer rampart of Christianity.”