As World War II was nearing its end, and the conundrum of an Eastern Europe \u201cliberated\u201d from Hitler by the Soviet Union was becoming a hot-button issue, Winston Churchill warned Soviet dictator Josef Stalin about the power of the Catholic Church in these countries. Without missing a beat, Stalin countered, \u201cHow many divisions does the pope of Rome have?\u201d<\/p>\n
As a former seminary student, Stalin should have known better than to regard religious opposition to Communism in strictly military terms. He should have remembered from his \u201cbourgeois morality\u201d days the symbolic power of a persecuted religious figure; of how the very suffering of such a figure could provide a living rebuke to totalitarianism.<\/p>\n
J\u00f3zsef Mindszenty (March 29, 1892\u2013May 6, 1975) was such a figure. This \u201cPrince Primate\u201d and leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary needed no military divisions to expose what Josef Goebbels once called the \u201cbig lie.\u201d His imprisonment and torture by the Hungarian Communist regime (in addition to beating him with rubber truncheons his captors slipped mind-altering drugs into his food) invalidated the slogan voiced by the American Communist Party during the 1930s: \u201cYou can still take communion and support the Soviet Union.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mindszenty opposed totalitarianism early. The son of peasant farmers, he attended the Szombathely Diocesan Seminary. He was ordained a priest in 1915 by Bishop J\u00e1nos Mikes. Mindszenty\u2019s lifelong anti-Communism, which eventually resulted in his imprisonment, began soon afterward. For criticizing what he considered \u201cthe socialist policies\u201d of the Minh\u00e1ly K\u00e1rolyi government, he was arrested in 1919. Momentarily freed, he was again arrested when the Communist Bela Kun government marched into power.<\/p>\n
But Mindszenty was also an opponent of Fascism. Unlike other priests who were compromised and then nourished by Fascism, he spoke out against the Hitler-like Arrow Cross Party in 1939. A year later he equated Hungarian Fascism with Hungarian Communism in an article entitled \u201cThe Green Communism\u201d (green was the color of the Fascist regime ruling Hungary). This was in a period where Hitler and Stalin were military partners and the Soviet Party line demanded party members to sabotage any war preparation in anti-Nazi countries. \u201cFascism,\u201d according to Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, was merely \u201ca matter of taste.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mindszenty continued his attacks on the Arrow Cross Party, now in command of Hungary during World War II. He protested against the regime quartering soldiers in his religious palace and their treatment of Jews.<\/p>\n
Then, after World War II ended, Mindszenty was appointed leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church. Hungary was by then a Soviet satellite, duplicating the police state tactics of the Kremlin. The Communist war against religion was in full swing by the ruling Hungarian Working People\u2019s Party. They cut into the cardinal\u2019s main source of income—lands owned by the church. They justified these seizures as a means to restore such \u201caristocratic lands\u201d back to the workers. The result, however, was that the regime leaders kept the lands to enrich themselves.<\/p>\n
Outraged, Mindszenty attacked the regime\u2019s attempts to stifle the religious instruction of children by abolishing and then seizing the land of Catholic schools. In place of God, the regime sought to indoctrinate children away from God and into a slavish worship of Stalin. His form of protest involved him driving to villages and urging the populace to resist the regime\u2019s attempts to seize their religious schools and property.<\/p>\n
In a letter during this period—banned but somehow a copy made it to the West—he wrote: \u201cCommunism is a despicable ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n
The regime, headed by the Stalinist Matyas Rakosi, predictably blasted the cardinal as being a reactionary supporter of Fascism (during the Nazi occupation of Hungary he had defended Jews). In 1948 they used this portrayal as justification for arresting Mindszenty: he was charged with \u201ctreason,\u201d followed by imprisonment. For defending himself against the charge of treason he was tortured into \u201ca confession\u201d of his \u201ctreachery.\u201d (Mere moments before his arrest by the secret police he wrote a note intended for the church faithful, instructing them to disregard any \u201cconfession.\u201d)<\/p>\n
From the docket Mindszenty collaborated in the regime\u2019s lies about him. He was accused of more than 40 \u201ccrimes,\u201d one of which involved him urging Americans to invade Hungary so he could get his \u201cland\u201d back. The prosecutor\u2019s summation stated that Cardinal Mindszenty had confessed to inciting \u201cthe American imperialists to declare war on our country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obviously tortured, he provided the \u201cconfession\u201d the regime had to beat out of him: \u201cI am guilty on principle and in detail of most of the accusations made,\u201d the cardinal said shakily. He disowned the disavowal he had written earlier. When asked why he had written it, he answered feebly, \u201cI didn\u2019t see certain things as I see them now.\u201d He also stated that he attempted to aid \u201cAmerican imperialists to declare war on our country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The West, however, saw his \u201cconfession\u201d as coerced.<\/p>\n
Pope Pius XII excommunicated any Catholics who supported the verdict. Declaring Mindszenty \u201cinnocent,\u201d he urged a crowd in St. Peter\u2019s Square to enlist in a fight against the communist ideology of the regime that tortured the cardinal: \u201c[Do you want a] Church that does not condemn the suppression of conscience and does not stand up for the just liberty of the people; a Church that locks Herself up within the four walls of Her temple in unseemly sycophancy, forgetting the divine mission received from Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n
The West was also outraged by the cardinal\u2019s obvious torture and imprisonment. Sam Rayburn, the Democratic speaker of the house, spoke for many Americans when he declared that the \u201cChristian world cannot help but be shocked over the verdict.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even atheistic leftists defended the priest. Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary for the Labor government, denounced the regime\u2019s repudiation of justice and civil liberty. The Hungarian diplomats stationed in the United States were outraged by the verdict and resigned in protest.<\/p>\n
Hardly a religious paper, the New York Times<\/em> nevertheless characterized him as \u201can intractable uncompromising foe of both Fascism and Communism.\u201d<\/p>\n Sidney Hook, a former Marxist turned secular anti-Communist, saw the verdict as an outrage and praised the cardinal as an authentic foe of totalitarianism in any form. George Orwell, no religious figure, praised the cardinal for showing how one can restore the idea of good and evil without religious justifications.<\/p>\n But there were some \u201cuseful idiots\u201d who supported the verdict. Journalist George Seldes defended the Hungarian party line. He blasted Mindszenty as a supporter of Nazism and a vicious anti-Semite.<\/p>\n Mindszenty remained in prison until the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Released, he vocally supported the anti-Communist rebels who briefly took power. He also broadcast his support of anti-Communist movements worldwide.<\/p>\n In a radio broadcast to the world, he blasted Communism in political terms: He supported, he said, a \u201cdemocratic, constitutional government under international control\u201d and \u201cprivate property rights rightly and justly limited by social interests.\u201d<\/p>\n He praised the rebellion: \u201cThe [Communist] system was swept away by the entire Hungarian people.… This was a fight for freedom unparalleled in the world, with the young generation at the fore of our people.\u201d<\/p>\n But he had to seek refuge when the Soviet army crushed the insurgents eight hours later. He fled to the American Embassy in Budapest, where he stayed until 1971, despite many urging him to leave Hungary (embassy officials, fearing their staff was penetrated by Soviet agents, never left him alone). Afterward he moved to Vienna, where he died in 1975. The Hungarian regime refused to have him buried in Hungary. Only when the Soviet regime collapsed was he reburied there.<\/p>\n At first glance Mindszenty would seem merely part of a long line of religious opponents of world Communism. But his example had political overtones, which explained the support given him by atheists and leftists. His arrests by Fascist and Communist regimes showed how it was possible to oppose both. His activism on behalf of the Jewish people in Nazi-controlled Hungary during World War II contradicted his forced confession of his anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n Conservative columnist John O\u2019Sullivan expressed it best about how politically important Mindszenty\u2019s trial was to the cause of anti-totalitarianism: \u201cYet when a final judgment of the cardinal\u2019s historical significance is made, it will surely conclude that his time as a prisoner of the Communists was the greatest period of his life. It was certainly the most influential since it informed the world of the nature of Stalinist Communism in the most dramatic forms. His trial contained many elements that subsequently became familiar as the cold war continued. There was, for instance, its revelation of the character of the Stalinist show trial and thus of Stalinism—something the Western allies had forgotten about or repressed in the wartime years when \u2018Uncle Joe\u2019 was our principal ally. There was the phenomenon of \u2018brainwashing,\u2019 about which we talked about a great deal at the time: getting someone to believe in his own guilt by a combination of brutality, deprivation of sleep, and constant argument from skilled interrogators. It seemed almost a form of witchcraft, and it was certainly a technique admirably suited to witch-hunting. There was the absurdity of the charges—they included the allegation that he [Mindszenty] was plotting to steal the crown jewels and hand them over to Otto von Habsburg in an effort to restore the monarchy and give himself political power as the leading cleric in a Catholic state. Such absurdities were a common feature of Stalinist show trials.\u201d<\/p>\n In this age of \u201cfake news,\u201d \u201cenhanced interrogation,\u201d and social media assassinations, it is more important than ever to nurture the rights of conscience and truth and take note of those like Mindszenty who push back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As World War II was nearing its end, and the conundrum of an Eastern Europe \u201cliberated\u201d from Hitler by the Soviet Union was becoming a hot-button issue, Winston Churchill warned Soviet dictator Josef Stalin about the power of the Catholic Church in these countries. Without missing a beat, Stalin countered, \u201cHow many divisions does the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[334],"tags":[166],"class_list":["post-6526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-march-april-2020","tag-march-april-2020"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}