Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
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of maintaining three or four dirt-floored, windowless school-buildings in each village; we must establish modern cultural centres and schools. More than half the Hungarian people attend four-form schools with a single teacher. In the future, thank God, through rationalization, and because the state is taking over the schools, such conditions will cease to exist. Such buildings, called denominational schools, yet nothing but hovels, will vanish in the near future. Over and above the secularization of church schools we must welcome the liquidation of the village school. On behalf of the Smallholders’ Party, which is a peasants’ party, I affirm that we are primarily concerned with the educational improvement of the Hungarian peasant. The rise of the Hungarian peasant will be gradually made possible with the improvement in his education. To give the people freedom, to give the Hungarian people the means of improving their condition would be in vain if we fail to make opportunities for educational advance available to them. Up to the present the village schools supported their own teachers—on a clearly miserable scale—while model schools were established in the big towns and in the capital. As a result the inhabitants of the big towns had easier access to education than those living in the backward villages. We are anxious to make the whole country one in future, for there must be no first-class and second-class citizens in this land. We are full of hope, and feel assured that the School Law will not be regarded as anticlerical, for Hungarian democracy has not the slightest intention of passing laws against the churches. We are full of hope, and we should like to see the church—in carrying out its divine and eternal tasks—finding its place in the people’s democracy as it has done in every social system during the past two thousand years. ... I should like to mention here that the municipality gave a four million forint subsidy to the Roman Catholic Church, and 500,000 forints to the other Christian denominations. But what in fact happened? 1 am a Roman Catholic myself and accept the view that the authorities of the church should have the decisive voice in religious questions; yet when these questions are not religious ones, but questions concerned with the whole of Hungarian culture, when it is not a matter of relations between church and state but of whether there is to be a Hungarian culture or not, I have to admit with regret that all the activities of the Catholic Church amount to no more than a campaign against Hungarian culture. I must also add that a proposal put forward by the municipality that a plot of land should be given to the Evangelical Church of Buda for the construction of a church is due for debate today—and this is not the first case of this kind, since there have been similar cases repeatedly in recent months. ... Fővárosi Közlöny [Municipal Gazette], No. 28, 1948. 123
