HIS-Press-Service, 1986 (9. évfolyam, 29. szám)
1986-02-01 / 29. szám
Page 7 ——-------------------------------------------------------HIS Press Service No.29, February 1968 4. Young people who have the desire to follow a spiritual vocation are above all expected as members. These would guarantee the continuance of the community or respectively the continuous incrase of the number of members. It is hoped, however, beyond that that among the former members of religious orders able-bodied persons will still be found who will enter the new community. EVALUATION Religious orders have been allowed in Hungary since 1950 only in connection with the eight Catholic high schools operated by them. Since 1980, Jesuits have been collaborating in a decisive manner on the program formation of the retreat house maintained and operated by the Bishops' Conference in Leányfalu. But for an official permission of the Jesuit order the most essential steps are still lacking. Experience shows that in Hungary now as much as ever there are young people who are interested in the religious life. It happens again and again that young men and women leave their homeland and that sporadically already ordained diocesan priests also illegally leave their diocese in order, following their calling, to enter a religious order abroad. Many difficulties and obstacles must be overcome in order to expand the permission to operate of the former orders. The bishops fear that through the permission of the religious orders even fewer diocesan priests might come forth from the already so scarcely attended seminaries. Unofficial investigations, however, yield other results: it is not life in the service of God that exerts so little attraction on the young people of today but life outside a community: the to a large extent lonely life of the secular priest. We shall hardly be able to win secular priests by withholding from people the possibility of entering an order. The one is not a substitute for the other. The party itself does not reject in principle the possibility of a readmission of the religious orders, although there are still many in its ranks who even today consider the suppression of the orders as a "political accomplishment" to which one must hold fast. For tactical reasons it is indeed evident that the party will not give away a pawn, as it were, that fell into its possession in the Stalin-era and for the redemption of which it hopes to draw political advantage from the Church. The Church places great hope in the foundation of the new religious order; for with respect to the institution of religious orders it is bringing for the first time in thirty-five years some movement into the rigidified fronts of Church policy in this area. It is moreover a proof for the fact that there really are possibilities worth exhausting.
