Hungarian Church Press, 1950 (2. évfolyam, 4-13. szám)

1950-04-01 / 6. szám

-3-Hungarian Church Press

fellowship with Jesus Christ, and even more, it was possible to gather these pious individuals into pious groups, and to be, Ct the same time, completely oblivious to the fact that lots of money could be made by owning tenement houses in the Párkány Street in which small rooms served as "homes" to 14-15 members of 3-4 families, in an environment of such physical, mental and spiritual destitution that it would have taken the crasses hypocrisy to demand of these people that they be "Christians". And there were many Párkány Streets in those days! There were hundred thousands of rural proletarians on the Great Plain whose staple food throughout the winter, was hut the beetroot that is only fit to be fed to the cattle.

Yet how many a time did the account of their poverty fall on deaf ears? It was my great sin that, while seeing all this,

I was content to dole out that charity that we were able to give and to administer drops of ointment instead of exposing my mind to the full impact of what I knew to be true: This society, with a large part of its peasants reduced to beggary, with its workers trying to break the chains of poverty, with its empty-headed and frivolous middle class and conceited politicians, was doomed. The outbreak of the war made me realize, with benumbing clearness, that the disaster will not be avoided. And yet there was a church, in the midst of this nation, with a wonderful past, an unworthy heir of the Reformation, a church that had no eyes to sec and no ears to hear, a church that was passively withdrawing, even in her best members,from that inevitable social transformation that was irresistibly drawing nigh through the debacles of the war. The large majority of church members had an aversion even to thoroughgoing individual piety, - yet how far a cry this was from rthriétiana' identifying themselves in humble repentance, with that people to which they belonged.

My forebodings of utter annihilation were made complete by that .en&ful symbol which seemed to take shape in the organized persecution of the Jews. I observed the devilish method whereby the Hungarian nation, which had always been constitutionally averse to anti-semitism, was inoculated by the virus of hatred agaiisst the Jews, It was exactly this policy of hatred which revealed to me and should have revealed to the church, had she had eyes to see, the Satanic character of that period and of that social system. As a matter of fact, it was this organized persecution which first awakened in the church the consciousness of corporate responsibility. Yet how slow and how reluctant was this awakening! It was my firm conviction that, in order to save the last tatters of the flag of our honour, .we must mobilize all our forces on this front by giving all the help we can to the persecuted Jews,

In a little book, in 1945, I gave an account of "How Hungarian Protestantism Fought Anti-Semitism?" May I add now that this fight was constantly confused and hampered by that bad conscience which our church leaders had, owing to their blindess as to social problems, in the previous decades. Anti-semitism proved to be a Satanic instrument, in the hands