Tárogató, 1949-1950 (12. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1949-07-01 / 1-2. szám

10

TÁROGATÓ

outward splendour and helped to finance the cultural and educational tasks of the Church; the Cardinal is concerned only about spiritual values, about those great values without which human life loses its meaning: freedom and human dignity. In this circular letter the Cardinal started his fight for the Christian Weltanschauung as opposed to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist theory of the world and life, and he did it outspokenly, courageously, with a tremendous sense of duty toward God and his fellowmen.

His action was the boldest attack on communism ever launched within the realm of a communist government. He was surrounded by the occupation forces of the Red Army, by the spies of the communist secret police, by gangs of communist agitators and mobs of gangsters who looted trains, and started antisemitic riots; and he, almost alone, raised his voice against these evil forces. There can be no doubt: two opposing forces here faced one another, the Cardinal and his followers, and the communists backed by the Red Army, Red police and the USSR.

The Cardinal spoke alone, but he had very many followers. The faithful rallied around him, both Catholics and very many Protestants. A tremendous change took place in the life of religion: religion became something without which people could not live, so much so that they had to proclaim this conviction aloud; the churches were crowded to capacity and beyond; pilgrimages were frequently held with hundreds of thousands participating in them, including Protestants. For the first time in centuries it happened that Catholics and Protestants drew near to one another and expressed a common front of believers against that of the unbelievers. Believers in what? In God, in freedom, in human dignity.

Were we to ask what the Cardinal did in the next three years, we might be given the answer in just one word: he preached. His sermons were printed in the only tolerated Catholic weekly, UJ EMBER (New Man), and I have read several of them. His subject was always God and His Ten Commandments as applied to Hungarian circumstances and with special reference to the Holy Virgin who has many shrines in Hungary and to whom Hungary was dedicated by the first Apostolic king, St. Stephen; the latter’s importance is far above that of a canonised Saint, since it was he who converted pagan Magyars and introduced Western Christian civilization into Hungary more than a thousand years ago. The Cardinal’s veneration of the Holy Virgin was so much in the foreground that his participation in the Marian festivals in Ottawa was taken for granted. To this excursion of his, like the one to Rome for his cardinal’s hat, a motive was attributed by his communist accusers for their own purposes.

Reading the Cardinal’s sermons is like reading his pastoral letters: here is a man who, by adhering firmly to God and His commandments, becomes the greatest and — through his enormous influence on the believing masses — the most formidable enemy of communistic materialism and communistic morality, a morality which does not believe in transcendent foundation. The fight was between God’s ambassador and the agents of atheism as dictated by Moscow. This became quite clear in the fight for education, for the schools.

The communists wanted and carried out the nationalization of denominational schools. They had previously introduced new textbooks which broke with Hungarian tradition and ignored the most brilliant feature of Hungary: her fight with pagan forces throughout the centuries. These textbooks were not acceptable by those who believed that the future of any organic being cannot be built except on the foundation of its past. There had already been harsh discussions about the new trend in the schools, when nationalization was dictatorially ordered by the communists and their fellow-travellers in 1948. It was preceded by a vast propaganda against the Cardinal in which first the Press was employed to denounce the Cardinal for his enmity to freedom of the press. Thinking people were inclined to laugh about this outburst by the Press which tried to defend a freedom which simply did not exist. Then workers’ groups were forced by the threat of loss of employment to give their signatures to declarations deplor-