The Catholic Church In Hungary Today

It was dusk when I met them: three lonely figures silhouetted in the day’s last light. Their heads were bowed down deep upon their chests. Their bodies were bent as if blown by perpetual wind. One man tilted slightly on his stronger leg, as if the other bore an excruciating weight. A second gazed out into space, battling with it like an invisible enemy. The third towered lamely over the others, his shoulders stretched tight like an overburdened yoke, irretrievably lost in grief. The three men were carved of stone. Their faces, after a century of exposure to wind and rain, were beginning to be eaten away. They were meant to represent a sad sacred scene: the crucifixion of Jesus and two thieves on Golgotha two thousand years ago.

The evening had come down like a dark windy veil over Lake Balaton, the largest lake in central Europe. On the map, Lake Balaton is a blue slash down through west-central Hungary.

I had come to see the 11th-century Benedictine Abbey of Tihany, built over the crypt of King Andrew the First, Hungary’s second king. It was just a short day trip from Budapest, a bit over an hour by car, to the abbey overlooking the water.

As I turned my eyes from the darkening lake to the ancient abbey which springs up like a fist from the top of the bluff toward the sky, I suddenly thought: this is the place which unites Hungary’s history and present. Here, on this headland jutting out into the shallow lake from the northwest side, the first migrating horsemen who wished to secure a settled strongpoint must have stopped and nodded their heads in agreement. Here was the spot any warrior, any military strategist, would have chosen to build his strong place. Balaton was the center of Hungary, this headland the center of Balaton, this bluff the center of the headland.

Appropriately the Catholic Church once chose this spot for a Benedictine abbey. The Abbey of Tihany is the oldest in Hungary.

Deep within the abbey church lies one of Hungary’s most important national monuments: the grave of Endre the First, son of Hungary’s first Christian monarch King Stephen, the oldest grave of a Hungarian monarch which has never been moved. Down in the abbey’s dusty crypt, the large stone slab covering Andrew’s grave seemed to rise a bit from the crypt’s packed earth to angle itself toward the last rays of light from the upper church’s gilded baroque interior to proudly display the chiseled stark marble cross on its surface. From 1055, Hungarians have come to this spot to be near the origins of their nation and – until the most recent era – of their national faith.

Outside the abbey, at the end of a carefully terraced tree-lined path, stood the three crosses and the men they bore. At another time of day, the stone of these figures might have seemed artificial, or worse, in bad taste. But in this light it seemed the stone figures moved, suffered, told compelling stories. They reminded me of all I had seen and heard during ten days of interviews as part of my assignment to investigate the current status of the Catholic Church in Hungary: of young Hungarians who denied that a single Marxist could be found among today’s youth, all having become disillusioned; of idealistic priests working in anonymity who often had been in police stations; of collaborating opportunistic priests who had lukewarm handshakes and smiles; of young people gathered in a church so crowded they could not move; of communist officials who spoke of political and economic reforms they were preparing, and who asked me not to write lies “like other Western journalists” about their country.

For the past forty years, Hungary had been a political and economic satellite of the Soviet Union. Hungary sided with the Germans in the Second World War, and with the Germans, lost. The nation paid for the defeat. Nearly two-thirds of its territory was taken away and given to surrounding countries: Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union itself. With the creation and support of a Communist party under the occupying Soviet forces, Hungary was incorporated into the Soviet orbit, the East Bloc. The nation, which always had been open to western European influences, found itself cut off from the West and forced to look eastward. For the Catholic Church (about 6.2 million strong in 1949, when the population was about 10 million – it is 10.5 million today) and the Protestant churches as well – primarily Lutheran and Calvinist – make up about 30 percent of the population – the new system meant radical suppression.

The Soviet-guided Hungarian government in the late 1940s and early 1950s forbade any religious activities outside church walls. It closed most prestigious professional posts to practicing Catholics. State policy sharply reduced the number of church ministers, priests, and nuns. Only three men’s religious orders, the Benedictines, Franciscans, and Piarists, and one women’s order, the Poor School Sisters, remained legal. The number of church-run hospitals and social service organizations were cut. In virtually every outward category of religious life, conditions were swiftly and drastically altered for Hungary’s Christian population.

In the 1960s a less brutal but still severe approach was taken toward both Catholic and Protestant churches by the Hungarian government, led by Janos Kadar, who came to power as the Soviet choice to restore Marxist order following the abortive 1956 Hungarian revolt. Kadar, now in his late 70s, still heads Hungary’s Communist party. Under his leadership, assisted by Imre Miklos, Hungary’s Communist Minister for Religious Affairs, the diplomatic boxing match of the 1950s between the Vatican – via Hungary’s proud intransigent Primate Josef Cardinal Mindzenty, who in 1956 had taken refuge in the American Embassy in Budapest and remained there for nearly two decades – and the Hungarian regime gradually was transformed into the diplomatic chess game of the 1960s.

Pope Paul VI (1963-78) introduced an “Ostpolitik” (Eastern European policy) of dialogue rather than confrontation, but negotiations were cautious.

“Papal eastern diplomacy or ‘policy,’ – seen as a technical means, as the art of the possible – follows the same basic pattern which underlies all international discourse — defense of one’s own interests through confrontation where coexistence is impossible, through compromises where they seem to be tolerable, through cooperation where there are partners for it,” writes Hansjakob Stehle, a West German journalist considered a leading expert on Vatican Ostpolitik. “The popes of this century have negotiated with Lenin and Stalin, made demands and offered concessions, written to Khrushchev, received Podgorny, Kakar, Gierek and Tito, talked, kept silent, fought, prayed and sometimes reached a modus Vivendi. They were all neither ‘reactionaries’ nor ‘progressives,’ but very human, strategically cautious, sometimes clear-sighted, often erring pastoral politicians.”

Hungary became the first East Bloc nation to agree to settle certain matters with the Vatican through a “partial agreement” in 1964, allowing the pope to name several new bishops to fill vacant posts in the Hungarian hierarchy. The agreement was signed for the Vatican in Budapest by Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, now Vatican Secretary of State and considered the chief architect of the Ostpolitik of dialogue.

“The policy of ‘all or nothing,’ or ‘now or never,’ cannot be morally defended even in emergencies,” Casaroli has said, rejecting the criticism that the Vatican has striven for agreements with the communists “at any price.”

The reason for this policy lies in Catholic doctrine: that the Church must be a “visible society” in which the sacraments are dispensed to the faithful by ordained ministers.

From 1963 on, then, a new era opened in church-state relations in Hungary. A second milestone was reached in 1975, when Hungary, like the Vatican, signed the Helsinki Accord on Human Rights. Imprisonments on religious grounds, already uncommon, became a rarity, and conditions for such prisoners improved noticeably.

But the Hungarian Church continued to experience a slow decline. Its bishops grew older. Its priests became fewer. Its public existence was protected, but there seemed to be less and less to protect.

One bright spot began to shine out in the general gloom, a movement of “base communities,” small groups of Catholics who came together, perhaps a dozen at a time, to pray and deepen their faith. Both Paul VI and John Paul II noted the existence of these communities with joy, terming them “the hope of the Church.”

But this movement seemed ominous to the regime. The hierarchical Church was subject to a good deal of state control. These small groups were more independent and, possibly – so the state argued – sources of “anti-social agitation.” Thus began the drama of base communities.

The base communities feel into two main groups, one stemming from a movement begun at the beginning of the century called Regnum Marianum (the reign of Mary), the other stemming primarily from the work of one priest, Father Gyorgy Bulanyi. In recent years two other types of “small community” movements have grown up: the charismatic movement, and an “independent” movement linked with individual parish priests.

According to one leading expert on the Hungarian Church, Father Imre Andras, a Jesuit who left Hungary and now follows church affairs there from an institute in Vienna, there are today in Hungary from 4,000 to 6,000 such small groups with 10-15 members each, giving an estimated total membership of anywhere from 40,000 to 90,000. The wide disparity between the lower and higher figure is typical of information regarding this movement. It is imprecise. There are no membership lists – and this helps explain why a state interested in controlling every detail of the religious life of its people might become concerned about such groups.

In Hungary today, three bishops’ sees are vacant and three more are in danger of becoming vacant soon, since the current bishops are very old or sick. Thus half the Hungarian episcopate soon will need to be reconstructed. The Vatican is very aware of this – and so is the Hungarian regime.

Precisely now, therefore, like no other church in the East Bloc, the church in Hungary is in an enigmatic position. It is more free than at any time since the arrival of the Communists, but it is operating on a relatively far lower level than before the Communists came to power. The episcopate is public and legal, but it is also old, and new nominations must receive state approval. The state is please with the working relationship it has made with the hierarch, but it is concerned about the relatively free life of the base communities. The state is content that the Church is weak and docile, but it also finds a problem of morale (and morality) among the population which may require some assistance from the churches to combat, so it doesn’t want to see the churches die out completely. The Vatican wants to nominate new bishops, but wants also to win government permission to expand its activities, publish more books, carry on evangelization outside the churches and play a larger role in Hungarian life.

These desires create a conflicting web of forces. In both the public and private activities of the official government-monitored church, and in the life of its “underground,” the Church in Hungary today faces critical turning points, and on none of these fronts does the correct path seem immediately clear.

The question at the heart of the Vatican Ostpolitik is whether the decision to conduct a dialogue with the Soviet and East Bloc communists will create a modus vivendi – way of living — for the church, or merely a smoothly orchestrated modus moriendi – a way of dying.

Hardliners – they call themselves realists – in Rome and elsewhere maintain that the policy yields little long-lasting benefit for the Church. Instead they propose that the Church return to the posture of confrontation which marked Vatican relations with communist regimes from the 1920s until the early 1960s.

Despite such criticism, the Vatican, under the influence of both idealism and pragmatism – both because it seemed right to talk with one’s fellowmen and because not talking seemed to make things more difficult, if not impossible, for the Church to survive – has made dialogue and compromise a large component of its Ostpolitik.

Has the policy worked?

The answers remain fragmentary and unsatisfactory.

One of the most dramatic recent initiatives in the Vatican’s Ostpolitik was a decision to participate in a philosophical dialogue with leading Marxists to explore ethical values that Christian and communist philosophies hold in common. The symposium was strictly restricted to philosophical, not political, issues. It was held in Hungary’s capital of Budapest from October 8-10, 1986, with a press conference to wrap things up on October 11.

The symposium was officially closed to journalists, but news conferences were held daily. Indeed, official press representatives winked as they handed out wireless headphones to journalists who wanted to “listen in” on the proceedings from the carpeted hallways outside. Set inside one of Budapest’s large downtown bank buildings, crowds appeared at the bank’s large glass plate doors, not out of curiosity about the conference, but to stare attentively at the Hungarian wrestlers battling there on the bank’s huge video screen. Inside, the babbling of the bank’s interior fountain provided counterpoint to the humming of professorial voices.

The symposium held behind the fountain had been publicized as “historically unprecedented” by its two sponsors – the Vatican and the Hungarian government – and the international press.

Before the 1980s, such a dialogue would have been considered a fantasy neither side was thought capable of supporting. But in 1986 Hungary’s capital was the site of a Catholic-Marxist symposium on “society and Ethical Values” bringing together Christian theologians and Marxist philosophers from 15 countries in eastern and western Europe.

“No official dialogue on this high level has ever been held before,” said Msgr. Franc Rode of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Non-Believers, one of the chief organizers of the conference.

A number of participants suggested that the conference was an example of “transcending national interests.” Still it seemed quite clear that the setting of the conference in Hungary revealed the extent to which this Soviet satellite has taken its own unorthodox path.

Over three day-long sessions, in a long windowless conference room lines with narrow tables topped by Coke bottles, Marxists sat shoulder to shoulder with Vatican officials and Catholic theologians. French Cardinal Paul Poupard, 55, head of the Secretariat for Non-Believers, peered over his corner of the table at Professor Jozef Lukacs, noted communist philosopher of Hungary. Jesuit Father Jean-Yves Calvez of France, professor of theology, and Catholic Professor George Cottier of Switzerland studied the faces of communist Professors Boris Grigorian and Victor Garadja of the Soviet Union. The diminutive Professor Eva Ancsel, a Marxist philosopher and the only woman present, followed the animated voice of French Jesuit Eduard Huber of Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University as he spoke of the concrete Christian meaning of the “kingdom of God.” There was even a representative from Cuba, Professor Jorge Ramirez Calzadilla, an elegant American in a tailored gray suit among the rumpled central Europeans.

Through small microphones mounted at each of the 30 participants’ seats, theoretical treatises of a general – and often tedious – nature were read and discussed. Name-calling was avoided. The Marxists were not branded as “atheists” by the Catholics. In turn, the Marxists avoided an mention of their precept that religion is largely “superstition” and will inevitably “wither away” as poverty and class divisions disappear and humanity no longer “projects” its woes on to a “make-believe god.”

Indeed the communist thinkers conceded that terms like “sin” and “individual conscience” could be meaningful philosophical concepts and could be incorporated into Marxist philosophical vocabulary.

The entire symposium came off without a hitch, except for one blunt question from an American journalist who asked a Russian philosopher if the participation at the conference of representatives from the USSR could be construed to suggest that USSR policy toward Catholics and other religious groups within the USSR and in the East bloc might be open to reformulation. The answer – following a good deal of head wagging about the “inappropriateness” of the question – was that the conference was confined to philosophical discussion and that “political issues” were not on the agenda.

So the conference proceeded. Only at the final press conference did some of the tensions which must have been under the surface throughout the symposium emerge. About 60 representatives of the international press, including a good-sized contingent from the Vatican press corps, wanted to know if anything concrete, any common statement or program for future action, had been hammered out. The answer: no.

Then, in response to a question about religious freedom, Father Rode said East German Professor Konrad Feiereis had lamented the “pressure” under which the Catholic church in East Germany lived.

East German Marxist professor Wolfgang Kliem, a tall, distinguished-looking philosopher, unfolded himself and stood up to correct Rode. The remark made by his east German Catholic colleague – who was not at the press conference – had referred only to the 1950s, not to the 1980s, Kliem said. It seemed a smile came to the generally solemn lips of Russian philosopher Victor Garadka, who nodded ever so slightly in agreement.

Rode was not to be denied. He insisted that Feiereis’ remarks referred to the contemporary situation of the East German Catholic church. Kliem, a bit resignedly, stood up a second time, and second time corrected Rode. The situation was once one of “pressure,” but no longer, he said. It would have been a standoff, had not the generally genial Hungarian organizer of the symposium, Professor Lukacs, taken the final word of the debate, of the press conference, and of the symposium.

Catholics must engage in dialogue with communists in an atmosphere of mutual respect and must not indulge in intemperate rhetoric or use such phrases when referring to Marxism as “the shame of our time,” Lukacs said. The phrase was used by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in a document on liberation theology (which attempts to use Marxist analysis as part of a Christian theology of social justice) published in 1984.

The onlooker could only conclude that the frustrations of these few men, their desire to carry on a dialogue and yet to be faithful to their own particular convections, to speak the truth but to do it politely, to converse with ideological enemies as if they were intellectual colleagues, were the frustrations of the larger world. The meeting of these men was remarkable in that it occurred, but it was a matter for reflection – one might almost say, for sorrow – that the divisions ran so deep.

The interest of the communists in a “search for common values” with Christians is not restricted to such philosophical symposiums. It appears on the practical level as well.

“Crisis of values” is a term heard frequently enough in the West. Whether used by thoughtful liberals or Bible-belt fundamentalists, it translates concretely into the modern moral and psychological wounds associated with “post-Christian” industrialized society: increasingly high rates of divorce, suicides among youth, alcohol and drug addiction, abortions that threaten to outnumber births, and birth rates in dangerous parity with death rates.

This crisis, which finds a particular form in eastern Europe because of the philosophical and practical impact of Marxist atheism, has begun to worry Hungarian communist officials.

The most striking social problem is Hungary’s suicide rate, now at a yearly rate of 43.5 per 100,000. That figure translates roughly into one suicide for every 2,000 people, or one suicide for every group equivalent to the size of student body of many larger American high schools. And, as in America, the rate of suicide among the young is particularly troubling. Hungary traditionally has had a high suicide rate, but now it leads the world, with one-third more self-inflicted deaths than the runner-up, Denmark.

Drug addiction is also on the rise. While there are 20,000 officially registered drug addicts, the real total is closer to 60,000, Hungarian sources said. Alcoholism is also a continuing concern, they said.

Family-related problems, too, preoccupy communist planners. While abortion rates have stabilized over the last few years, according to Hungarian officials, divorces continue to rise. Some 120,000 Hungarian couples wed each year, while 30,000 break their marriage bonds.

On the human level, many Hungarians have proved unable to handle the pressures that go with recently liberalizing economic reforms. An estimated 15% of the work force reportedly takes sedatives on the job. A recent survey showed that half the workers have trouble sleeping at night because of job-related worries. By 1980 one-third of the men who were eligible for military service had been rejected because of neuroses.

The apparent new government strategy to help battle this public malaise: recruit the soldiers of the Church.

“It doesn’t matter the way in which a sick person is made healthy again,” said Lazslo Pozsonyi, director of the Secretariat for International Affairs in Hungary’s government Office for Religious Affairs. Sitting in a former mansion with sweeping staircases and carved wooden archways that had served as the diplomatic quarters for the Shah of Iran before World War I, Pozsonyi noted that churches here have been permitted to set up hotlines to answer calls from the desperate.

Even if the Catholic Church makes converts while helping potential suicide victims and drug addicts?

“The fundamental interest of our country is to lead those people who have some conflict with society or their family back to society and their family,” the cordial bureaucrat replied. “If someone who is thinking along the lines of Roman Catholicism wants to contribute something to family, nation or mankind, then good. It is his natural right. We are encouraging the Church to continue. To solve all these problems, we haven’t yet found all the right methods. The churches have special priests and ministers to deal with such conflicts.”

Pozsonyi added that the Church’s position on abortion complemented the government’s recent pro-natalist policy. The Hungarian government has passed measures to promote larger families through maternity subsidies, more public day care, and preferential status of families of more than three children in state housing, Pozsonyi said.

Estimates vary about how many practicing Catholics there are in Hungary today. Some informed church members say the figure is fewer than one million, about 10 percent of the population and about 15 percent of the number of “nominal” Catholics.

This “active Catholicism” expresses itself within the strict limits imposed by the regime. Indeed, the fact that the numbers are so small could be attributed solely to the regime’s repression. But in the West as well, where outward religious repression does not exist, numbers of active Catholics have also declined since 1945, raising the question of the impact of modern culture in general on religious sensibility. Still, this does not make the fact of Hungarian Catholicism’s decline less real.

At 7 pm on a Thursday night in a Budapest parish, under two angels winging toward each other on the church’s arched front, a crowd of three to four hundred blue-jeaned and Adidas-jacketed men and women nearly overflow the church. A handwritten poster outside explained why. Tonight Dr. Bolberitz Pal is speaking on “Sz Mate evangeliuma” – St. Matthew’s Gospel. Despite the church’s uninspiring interior, with the same prefab quality of a newly built small town American church, the speaker held the crowd’s attention for more than an hour.

Elsewhere there are other signs of a vibrant church life in Hungary today: an emerging Catholic media, the presence of religious bookstore on Budapest’s busy Liberation Square, and the country’s active churches and base communities. At one church in a small town outside Budapest I saw thousands of young people come together for Mass and hours of singing.

The young people’s meeting came one day when I drove out of Budapest by car and followed the curves of the Danube north and then west to the town of Nagymaros. I had heard that a yearly meeting of one branch of Hungary’s base communities, called Regnum Marianum, was taking place there. For the inside of Nagymaros’ small 17th-century Baroque church, a voice carried Hungarian prayers through the air as I walked outside the packed church through a crowd of two or three thousand I felt I had come upon a large political rally. Outside teenagers sat on curbs, lost in concentration on words emanating from loudspeakers strapped to trees. Groups of young girls distributed thick slabs of bread, shining with butter and large crystals of salt, on almost unmanageable trays. Hands reached out quickly, almost greedily, for the bread.

I asked for the local priest. I was directed to Father Lajos, who appeared to be in his late 30s. Father Lajos’ lavender priestly stole, set askew on his shoulders absentmindedly, contrasted with his black turtleneck, cuffed blue jeans, and white dirty sneakers. A wrinkled paper pinned to the priest’s shirt displayed a small black cross and the block-printed name “Lajos.” The priest did not seem at all surprised by the crowd’s size.

“Every year more and more people come together here,” said Father Lajos, who is associated with the base community movement Regnum Marianum. The movement numbers about 2,000 to 3,000 members today.

“Fifteen years ago, when the first meeting was held, only about 400 came,” said Father Lajos. “At that time, the head of the State Ministry for Religious Affairs in Budapest, Imre Miklos, said all religious activity held outside church walls was illegal. Three years ago, the policy said we could not put a loudspeaker in the square. Now it’s okay,” the priest said, against a background of tree-suspended electric wiring. A song written at Taize, the ecumenical community near Cluny, France, whose liturgical music has spread worldwide, suddenly floated in the air and was picked up by listeners familiar with its melody.

Father Lajos took me several steps up the hill to the church’s rectory. It buzzed like a hive. Stockpiled loaves of bread were sliced, buttered, salted, and sent out by aproned workers. In the courtyard, dozens of young broad-shouldered men stirred and pressed down creases in the black and gold stoles of their brilliantly white gowns, hemmed with embroidery. In the shrinking space, elbows and arms collided like atoms in a charged molecule. These men, a segment of Hungary’s priestly community, proceeded down the hill and into the church to its altar, where bright lights and the press of their clothes forced beads of sweat on their foreheads.

A place was found for me on the altar’s side, under an earlier century’s fading frescoes and next to a small screen which projected lyrics for the crushing altar crowd. I was led to it by a young woman who returned afterwards to a stretcher in the sacristy, just outside the altar doors. There she pumped a rubbery heart-sized plastic container over the deformed shape of another young woman, lying below, whose large eyes looked out over a lopsided face at the knobby bulges of two twisted wrists. The crowd made way for other stretchers and wheelchairs which gravitated to the altar doors.

The priests, now densely packed in a semicircle, were preceded at the altar by two young guitarists and 25 young singers who ignored the flies that landed on their backs and shoulders as they sang the liturgy. Beyond them, through the cloudy haze of spotlights, a congregation of several hundred joined in and then grew quiet as the presiding priest stood up for the homily.

Afterwards Father Lajos spoke about the history and current situation of church-state relations.

“The government does not simply control the Church — it dictates to the Church,” he said. “We cannot have a single bishop without the approval of the state.”

“The Church here is not free – it is just a little more free than it was,” he added. “According to the law we can do whatever we want. But there are unstated laws, and many dangers.”

“In the 1960s, when priests were in prison, police were called in daily to tell them: any work outside the church is illegal. Starting in 1972-73, the authorities said there would be no more priests in prison, and that the bishops should take care of those priests who caused trouble. The reason for this was that putting priests in jail gave too much bad publicity to the Hungarian government. There was a breath of fresh air after the Helsinki agreement. But if a priest works very well with young people, and works not only in the rectory but in houses and with families, it is still illegal. The state notices what you are doing, and tells the bishops: you must move. With the bishops in this position now, it is a satanic vicious circle. In the 1970s, the chief justice said that when a priest took a church youth group on a forest walk, it was illegal. Priests who act this way find that they are suddenly transferred by their bishops to new parishes and must start again. They lose their passports and cannot travel outside the country.

“The state police listen to your phone calls. Sometimes a priest will get a call around 8 or 9 in the evening. He hears nothing. It’s likely the police – to see if we’re at home or out working. It is a secret of the state that the letters of certain people are always opened, and that all letters are subject to a check.

“The number of Catholics who go to church is lowest in the bishops’ parishes. This is because people there know they can be watched.

“A lot of couples in their 30s who never have received First Communion come to Church to ask that their children be baptized. There is an incredible hunger for God. There are fewer and fewer priests in the Church, and fewer educated laity, but more and more young people.

“It may be that the state now wants us to help with the drug problem. They want help from us without changing their policy otherwise. The state is trying to hand the problem to the Church, but the Church has no help to give because it doesn’t have the resources.

“The state minds if we work with normal people, but doesn’t mind if we work with people who have problems – old people, the mentally retarded. With normal children and with normal youth, there are restrictions. Priests work with young people so they don’t become alcoholics, prostitutes, people of the street. But then, the police say, you cannot work with the young.

“We can only help alcoholics and drug addicts if we change the entire personality, which involves a spiritual metanoia. Now we have an entirely new problem: the problem of youth on the periphery of society, deviance, suicides. A television program from the west on Satanism is being shown in Hungary now. Twenty to thirty thousand youths attend western rock concerts held here. Nevertheless, the Communist youth newspaper comes out and says the concerts are good. The Communist youth paper is like a sex sheet. Its only subjects are rock concerts and sex. Now that the Iron Curtain is up in Hungary, these things from the west are flooding in.

“There are two chapters in Hungary’s history after the Second World War. The first was the terrorist regime. Then, in the 1960s, there was the goulash practical materialism with the goal of the dolce vita – to eat, drink, have sex, sleep.

“Now people are driving themselves desperately to get a house, a car, to move up. They are dying in their 40s of heart attacks. They have no kids, or one kid, or abortions. In the 1950s and ‘60s, there were one-half to one million abortions a year. If there were no abortions, today Hungary would have a population of 20 to 30 million more people. For the last two years, there have been fewer abortions. Two years ago, the state saw that there were more deaths than births. Julius Fekete, a Hungarian sociologist who is pro-birth, calculates that the losses from abortions in the past two years equal the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Hungarians at the end of World War II by the Russians at Danau.”

Father Lajos also spoke on the situation of base communities today.

“The state hopes to keep the base communities from working with the bishops. Three times the state has tried to fight against Regnum Marianum. Three times over the past 16 years, Regnum priests, who total between 25 and 39 now, have been in prison, in 1960, 1965 and 1970. I was in prison too.

“The state wants any kind of schism in the church. Miklos wanted Father Bulayni of the Bulanyist movement condemned so that the Church would remain divided in Hungary. They won’t say it, but they want it.

“Let leave this theme to sleep. There are many more important issues we face now – the need for a new catechism, the lack of paper for books.”

Other voices among the Hungarian laity give a similar view of the Hungarian Church: alive – even vibrant in places – but subject to tight state control.

“Ten years ago, an occasion like this one would not have been so simple,” said a wiry middle-aged laywoman, whose face twitched nervously under a network of wrinkles. “The parish priests can tell you how many times the police came around to give trouble.”

Despite the improvements in the past decade, these lay people see grave problems continuing for the church. Their religious response is prayer. They say a movement of prayer – uncontrollable by the state police – is being joined by thousands of Hungarians.

“We have begun a spiritual struggle. There is a metanoia occurring in Hungary,” the woman continued. “It began with a handful. It has gone from tens to hundreds to thousands. The beauty of it is that it is completely legal, completely within our rights, completely innocuous to all outward appearance, and yet completely free, completely uncontrollable by the state.

“Seven years ago a group of about one hundred people began to pray monthly for the unity of the Church in Hungary,” said a priest. “Our goal is to end our isolation from our bishops. The state desires to keep the bishops in their palaces, fearful of leading their people. We want to make it possible to get in touch with the bishops. That wish led to the beginning of a Pentecostal prayer. We all prayed the same prayer, for unity. The very next year, we met here with Cardinal Lekai.”

The secret prayer began with a handful, then spread to the young, the old, the priests.

“We began to fast,” the woman said. “Now we take only bread and water on Fridays. It’s an escalation.”

Hungary’s Catholic base community movement goes back at least as far as the late 1940s. It seems to be the people’s response to a regime which, in their eyes, may have justly curbed the Church’s temporal powers, but unjustly oppressed its spiritual power. Hungary’s base communities provide a vital center for the national Church as well as a continual reminder to the state of the Church’s popular strength.

Because of the nation’s linguistic and ethnic unity, the impact of the Church’s previous temporal powers on a national religious consciousness, and the popular Church’s historical stamina, the Church in Hungary today represents a force which is not only “durable,” as the present of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences expressed it at the symposium, but which now is seen by the state to be a potential ally to “bring back to society and family,” as the state bureaucrat put it, men and women who feel psychologically or spiritually afloat.

Columbia
May 1987