Dénesi Tamás (szerk.): Collectanea Sancti Martini - A Pannonhalmi Főapátság Gyűjteményeinek Értesítője 3. (Pannonhalma, 2015)
II.Közlemények
244 GEREBEN FERENC: ETŰDÖK CZIRÁKI LÁSZLÓ OSB CENTENÁRIUMÁRA “You are always in my presence spiritually...” Etudes for the centenary of László Cziráki OSB Based on hitherto unpublished documents held in the Manuscript Collection of the Archabbey’s Library in Pannonhalma and relying on the author’s personal memories, the present paper commemorates the Benedictine monk and teacher, László Cziráki (1915– 1981) on the centenary of his birth. Cziráki was called to priesthood by a late vocation. After World War II and being released as a POW, inspired by the works of Paul Claudel , the French writer and diplomat, he joined the Benedictine Order. He completed his studies of Hungarian and French language and literature still as a lay person at the elite university college, the Eötvös József Collegium in Budapest. He taught in the secondary schools of the Order in Pannonhalma and Győr between 1953 and 1981. He was so much appreciated by his students that they remember him with great gratitude and affection even today (starting a fund, attending masses of commemoration, recollections, etc.), setting him as a never fading model figure of love of service and activity. The paper quotes abundant details from Cziráki’s manuscripts of meditations on pedagogy in which he examines his own work of teaching and educating. During the era of communist dictatorship he was mainly concerned about the way how the remaining few catholic secondary schools could provide an education in whose framework the “teaching of the Saviour” could be transmitted besides up-to-date and professional store of learning. He had a feeling that he completes his highly responsible task in an age of historic significance therefore he also assumed the role of a chronicler in a particular pedagogical situation. He records reserved but wonderfully stirring confessions and exhortations about the sorrows and joys of education and the love that permeates all these. “You are always in my presence spiritually. (...) I am informed about every quiver of the community’s disposition by all my nerves” – he wrote to his students who can read these lines of his now 34 years after his death. In his manuscripts there are also a great number of ideas about sharing experiences related to literature and teaching reading, which discuss not only aspects of his teaching but also those of his activity as a librarian and a leader of a study circle, etc. The paper publishes his friendly correspondence with the writer Lajos Maróti about the novel of the latter narrating Maróti’s quarrelsome way of leaving the Benedictine Order. The last part of the paper reveals the documents of visit to Taizé made by László Cziráki, an early and devoted supporter of ecumenism in 1965, together with a moving letter to him by Roger Schütz . One of the letters also disclose that the representatives of the Taizé-community visited Pannonhalma as early as the middle of the 1960s, thus the spiritual bridge of ecumenism between Pannonhalma and Taizé has a past of half a century here and now.
