Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 1989 (1. évfolyam, 1-24. szám)

1989-06-02 / 13. szám

AMERICAN Hungarian Journal CARDINAL PASKAI’S VISIT TO SUB-CARPATHIA The thousands of religious books in Hungarian language, a present of the Hungarian Cat­holic Church to the Catholic pa­rish of Munkács, filled up two vans. The 1170 adult and an equal number of children’s prayerbooks, 500 Holy Scriptures and Old Testaments will serve the religious practices of 60,000 believers of Hungarian origin on Soviet territory. A few days after the books fol­lowed the visit of Cardinal László Paskai, Archbishop of Esztergom. His host, Archdea­con József Csáti, later told re­porters that, though there is a marked change in ecclesiastical policy, the conditions for reli­gious life still do not exist. There are only seven practi­cing parish priests in Sub-Car­­pathia, all over the age of 70. They hope that the Cardinal’s visit will result in the arrival of some priests from Hungary to act as "guest workers" conduc­ting religious services. It is a change for the better that Hun­garian-speaking theology stu­dents can now study at the Se­minary of Eger. Paskai is the first such high­­ranking Church dignitary to visit this part of the Soviet Union in forty years. He has a rich sche­dule of events prepared for him, celebrating mass, confirmation, and meeting the believers in ci­ties like Ungvár, Munkács, Be­regszász, and several smaller settlements. He will also have a chance to conduct discussions with the bishops of the Ortho­dox and Reformed Churches about the religious life of Sub- Carpathians. Selfless men, with a strong sense of morality Ernő István Bajai, reporter of the Budapest newspaper Re­form, interviewed József Cser­háti, bishop of Pécs. Here are some of the questions and ans­wers: They say that the Catholic Church of Hungary is not prepa­red to take advantage of the wi­der sphere of action permitted by the reforms. It is true that the Catholic Church is not prepared for the utilization of the new possibiliti­es. The obvious reason for this is that the Church had been for­ced into silence and hiding. On the other hand, due to this inner withdrawal, about 60% of the believers (not only Catholic, but also of other denominations) had held out, survived, and is practicing his religion as well as possible. Then we are not even talking of a new beginning? In its outward appearance, the Church resembles a man who has weakened and lost conscio­usness. It is paralyzed because its limbs have been cut off. It has no institutions, organizations or possibilities for action outside the church. But it has another kind of preparedness: the force of hunger and thirst deriving from waiting and suffe­ring, the longing towards a puri­fied world. What do you expect from the constitutional state? The human soul is colorful and multifaceted. It cannot be rest­ricted. The soul thrives on free­dom. Freedom means plura­lism, pluralism means democ­racy, democracy means solida­rity, that is, a concerted effort of all individuals who make up so­ciety. We do not advocate the reha­bilitation of any individual or group, but the need to learn to forgive one another. The rule, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is not an evangelical prin­ciple. Progress is not achieved by digging up old grievances, but by forgiveness. Calypso and Juventus Balaton Hungarians are fed up with the way things were in the past - in every area of life. In the free world radio stations have chan­ged over to a new type of prog­ramming decades ago, while in Hungary, until recently, the sa­me old hurdy-gurdy had been grinding on, like a memento of the failures of the past. It is only in the last few months that the sound of revo­lutionary changes started to ap­pear on the air. On May 22 a radio station based, both busi­­nesswise and tecnically, on the American system, started trans­mitting in Budapest. It is pri­marily a business station sup­porting itself from advertise­ments. It is the second such sta­tion in Hungary, "little brother" of Danubius, and it bears the name of Calypso 873. The name is taken from Greek mithology, or at least from the charac­teristic music of the natives of the Antilles, in order to avoid even the shadow of suspicion re­garding the outdated past. The new station transmits a musical program of "ever­greens", from Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby to our day, inter­rupted by an hourly service of news and information, the pro­gram is run by 13 moderators who are announcers and record operators - Hungarian counter­parts of the American DJ. The Calypso 873 (the figure re­fers to the Megaherz number of the station on the medium wave­length) is a joint enterprise of Hungarian Radio and the Multimedia international music agency. The second new program, in­dependent of Hungarian Radio, can be found hallway between the two official radio stations, Kossuth and Petőfi. It was fo­unded by the Veszprém Regio­nal Publishing Agency, and it only transmits on certain days, mostly weekends, primarily for the area around Lake Balaton - hence its name, Juventus Bala­ton. This page translated by Susan Jancso, member of the American Translators Association THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM Looking back upon our cen­tury, we have to come to the conclusion that it has been ruled by a series of alternating limi­ted, authoritarian, paternalistic and corrupt regimes, glazed over by either a leftist of a right­ist varnish - reasons Dr. Péter Fodor Gábor, legal expert, one of the founding members of FI­DESZ. -Of course, there were more or less bearable periods of each. The Szálasi and Rákosi dictatures stand out by their ar­rogance and bloodthirstiness, while the years of retribution af­ter the revolution of 1956 repre­sent the darkest era of our his­tory.- We never really had a taste of democracy. Not even in this century, though there had been three tentatives to establish de­mocracy and liberty in Hungary. It’s just that 1918 was too short­lived, 1945-47 was overshadow­ed by the political dominance of Russia and the Allied Forces, and the third tentative, in 1956, was again too quickly stamped out. We have lived the last four decades of our history in a pro­letarian dictatorship. Under the circumstances, how can we talk about liberty? Obviously we can’t. Even though a lot of things have changed in the last few years. We live in the illu­sion of freedom. However, this situation is much more bearable than the previous one. The Father Of the Atomic Bomb Was Not Einstein Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging development of an ato­mic bomb - the famous docu­ment that started the Nuclear Age - was not written by Ein­stein at all. It was ghostwritten for him by a relatively little­­known Columbia University physicist named Leo Szilard. In 1939, Szilard and Princeton scientist Eugene Wigner app­roached Einstein to ask a vital favor: Given his great stature, would he lend his name to the promotion of a serious study of nuclear energy’s wartime appli­cations and the design and construction of an atomic bomb? Einstein agreed, although he confessed relative ignorance about nuclear chain reactions. Szilard wrote a draft and pre­sented it to him for his signature on Aug. 2. The message finally went to Roosevelt. "I ... only acted as a mailbox," Einstein later wrote. "They brought me a finished letter, and I simply mailed it." "COACH" and famous Hungarians The English word "coach" derives from the Hungarian kocsi, meaning "from Kócs". The first coach was, in fact, con­structed by the blacksmith of the village of Kócs at the begin­ning of the 15th century. The Germans called it "Kutsche", in English it became "coach", in French "coche". More famous than the Hun­garian kocsi was the Hungarian cavalry. The Light Cavalry of the Magyars - the Hussars - was widely imitated by other nations, both in terms of organization and detail of uniform. At the end of the 17th century, Louis XIV ordered the establishment of three separate Hungarian regiments. Count Ladislas Ber­csényi was appointed inspector general of the French Cavalry and later, in 1757, Marshal of France. Colonel Michael Kováts (1724- 1779) was another great soldier who served a foreign nation, serving as a colonel in command of the Pulaski Legion in the army of the United States during the War of Inde­pendence. It was Colonel Ko­váts who recruited, organized, trained and led into battle the first American cavalry, of which he is the recognized founder. He was killed in action in May, 1779 at Charleston. Memorials honoring his deeds were established at the Charleston Citadel in South Carolina, in Washington D.C. and in New York City. Colonel Kováts wa s the precursor of other Magyar military heroes in the service of the United States. At the time of the Civil War there were about 4,000 Hungarians in the New World, most of them exiled veterans of Kossuth’s army, of whom about 800 volunteered for war service. About 100 of these were officers. No other im­migrant group in America fielded such a high ratio of sol­diers. Two of the Hungarians fighting in the Civil War became major generals, and five reached the rank of brigadier general. Major General Julius H. Stahal (Számvald) commanded an army corps and received the Congressional Medal of Honor, General Alexander Asbóth led an army division, was in charge of a district, and was appointed the American ambassador to Argentina. Turning to more professions, we continue with Ágoston Ha­­raszty who entered American history by founding California’s huge grape-growing industry. Haraszty began his empire by importing 200,000 grape cuttings from Europe, including the famous Tokay grapes from his native Hungary. With the pass­ing of time, he turned over half a million California acres to viticulture, making wine growing second only to orange produc­tion in the state’s agricultural economy. In recognition oof his merits Haraszty was named California’s State Commissioner of Viticulture. Many streets in that state bear Haraszty’s name. California was the scene of still more famous achievements by Americans of Hungarian origin who concentrated their pioneer­ing efforts in a single city: Hol­lywood. It can be said that the birth of the American film in­dustry was made possible through the efforts of such Hun­garian film pioneers as Adolph Zukor and William Fox. It was Zukor who produced the first American-made full length film, The Prisoner of Zenda. He went on to produce many others through the studio he founded, Paramount Pictures. William Fox, born in the Hungarian vil­lage of Tolcsva, brought the products of Hollywood close to the people through the Eox theaterchain. The fame of these men has be­en matched - in a different but related field - by Jospeh Pulitzer (1847-1911). Born in Makó, Hungary, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 16 and promptly enlisted in the Hungarian contingent of the First New York Cavalry Re­giment. At the age of 18, alre­ady a veteran of the Civil War, Pulitzer went to St. Louis, where he began as a reporter with a German-language paper. Years later he took over the ailing St. Louis Post Dispatch and developed it into a flourishing publication under the motto "ac­curacy, terseness, accuracy". In 1883, he left the Post-Dispatch and bought the New York World, which, under his leadership, be­came one of the outstanding newspapers in the country. When Pulitzer died in 1911, he left a donation of two million dollars to Columbia University to establish a graduate school of journalism. His name is per­petuated by the yearly distributi­on of Pulitzer Prizes which he inaugurated "for the encourage­ment of public service, public morals, American literature and the advancement of education." The prizes are presented an­nually to American writers, ar­tists, and journalists. Joseph Pulitzer also left a donation that few know about for something that a wes mil­lions: a fund for the floodlighth­­ing of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. One traveler who must have passed through New York Har­bor many times was the Hun­garian explorer, John Xantus (1825-1894), whose priceless collection of ethnographical and mineralogical specimens are greatly valued possessions of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Commissio­ned first by the Institute, then by the Hungarian government, this original man travelled around the globe several times. Xantus wrote the best eth­nographical works on Indians, and founded the first American Meteorological Institute in the Pacific Ocean. If we wish to follow the path of other great Hungarian travelers we must leave the American continent for Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Chronologically, the first was Count Móric (Maurus) Benyovsky (1721-1786) who dis­covered numerous islands in the Pacific Ocean. He was a high­­style adventurer who, in the beginning of his career, was captured by the Russians in the Russo-Polish war, and later in­terned in a fortress at Kamchat­ka. 1989. június 2. AMERIKAI Magyar Hírlap 0 (Continued)

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