HIS-Press-Service, 1985 (8. évfolyam, 26-28. szám)
1985-02-01 / 28. szám
HIS Press Service No.28, February 1985 Page 9 Hungarian were added to these other ones too. Due to the changed conditions the Church needed a number of essential measures. And since such measures could only be realised with the help of the State, the inevitable question - what would be allowed by the State - became the fundamental principle of every point to be considered. The most urgent task of the Church is pastoral care. The efforts undertaken by the clergy must, above all, be concentrated on creating as great a scope as possible from the State. That it is indeed a case of "wrestling" is shown in the countless statements made by the bishops and the state representatives, e.g. in the case of the base groups. Internal disagreements and controversies within the Church about relatively subsidiary matters, the absence of "ordered conditions" within the Church itself - as Imre Miklós puts it - result in more important church problems, such as the acute lack of priests, the tasks of evangelization, the lacking collegiality within the Bishops Conferenc etc., being pushed back into the background. In 1976 Cardinal Lékai, on the occasion of his appointment as Archbishop of Esztergom, had presented his programme for the welfare of the Church in a declaration to representatives from the Press; there had been talk of a more satisfactory regulation of the religious instruction in the churches, the involvement of lay persons in the organising of church life and in evangelization, the organization of pastoral care and the securing of new priests, as well as the necessary sizing-up the situation in pastoral care. Since this time eight years have passed and out of the entire programme, only one definite ruling was achieved, namely in Point 1. As far as Point 2 is concerned, there were initially some positive starting-points, but most members of the faithful, who would have been prepared to help in the organization of church life, resigned when they found out that their voluntary engagement in the service of the Church was subjected to state control. Having to put up with this feeling of being watched constantly in carrying out this gratuitous apostolic work and because of it, exposing oneself to inconveniences from the authorities, is more than can be expected from most of the faithful. - The problem of how relief might be obtained for places without pastors is, as before, unresolved; through the fact that the care of such "orphaned" places is additionally burdened onto the available pastors, the breakdown of the present situation is actually accelerated. - The lack of priests is more catastrophic than ever. The already insufficient number of 300 seminarians has sunk to even less than 200 in the academic year 1983/84, - and on top of that, the standard of the training leaves much to be desired. - The taking stock of the situation planned in 1976 and the requirements of the Church, has still not been carried out. An institute for the examination of the Church's situation had, admittedly, been planned, but this very promising intention did not materialize as it was discovered that the ideas on the methods of procedure of the
