Tárogató, 1949-1950 (12. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1949-07-01 / 1-2. szám
TÁROGATÓ 9 the occupying forces.” He tells that it was most painful to him to notice that the indissolubility of marriage was unnecessarily relaxed by the temporary government, which in this went far beyond its authority. As to the land reform: “Party politics asserted itself in it and our soldiers were left out of the land redistribution.” “We do not criticize the Land reform, only the revengeful spirit which manifested itself in it. The “system” is inclined to violence, says the Cardinal. All over the country men are arrested on empty suspicion, individual grievance, personal complaint, or because of party manipulations, men who have no idea for what they were arrested ... The priest who because of his sick lungs spent years in a sanatorium is sentenced to heavy labour only because he protested against the illegal breaking-up of a village Catholic society. For their sermons on St. Stephen’s Day priests are imprisoned for days and, in order to give more weight to their threats, the head of the political police declares that priests will be deported to Siberia if they go on opposing the present system. All these may be trespasses but the number of trespasses is startingly multiplying and could hardly happen if the government were strong. We would not have landed in the present uncertainty if the government people had not closed their eyes to the faults of the trespassers and if the lawless did not feel protected.” The Cardinal complains that during the week of St. Stephen’s feast there was an official attack on St. Stephen at the teachers’ re-education course, where one of the re-educators openly declared that atheism would be the directing spirit of future schools. “We notice everywhere that either fundamental rights are despised and the mightiest pillars of society, morals and justice, are ignored; or they trample upon those traditions and ideals which would educate the suffering Hungarian people to spiritual uplift, nobility and sacrifice.” The Cardinal finished his pastoral letter (which was written in the name of all the Hungarian bishops) by admonishing the faithful that they should pay attention to his words and during the elections give their votes to those candidates who will “fight in the interest of moral purity, law, justice and order and will be able also to fight against the abuses of present-day sad conditions.” What surprises us in this pastoral letter is the fact that it lacks devotional character entirely, that it could hardly be called denominational, rather, just Christian, and that, apart from references to the Hungarian scene, it gives the principles of any honestly-conceived democracy for any country in the world and as such may be easily accepted by any man of moral integrity. The Cardinal believes in democracy as understood by the Western powers, he is very much against tyranny, he greets the Four Freedoms. He is against tyranny, which he experienced under the Nazis and the manifestation of which he experiences now in an ever-increasing number of instances. Although he does not mention communism by name, there cannot be the slightest doubt that he thundered against the communists who exchanged the absolute rule of one man, Hitler, for that of another, Stalin, the violence of one group, Nazis, for that of another group, Communists; who have the same sort of secret police to arrest people for the party’s purposes and send them to Siberia; who attack freedom of conscience, the right of parents to educate their children; who do not permit the workers to develop into free personalities, and who introduce slave labour. It was the Communists who started to reeducate the teachers in a spirit that was opposed to Hungarian cultural tradition and openly in the spirit of atheism. It is the spiritual values of Western civilization, a civilization developed on the basis of faith in God and faith in the dignity of man, which the Cardinal defended against those who attacked these values and put their new “system” in their place. He did not make an issue of the land reform which meant enormous loss to the Church, he spoke only of the abuses which were committed in the redistribution of land. There is no trace of materialist thought in this pastoral letter in the sense that the Cardinal would deplore the loss of those means which gave to his office an
