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

1949-07-01 / 1-2. szám

12

TÁROGATÓ

scientiously. (When I taught in a Hungarian town where in certain classes the Jews were in the majority, we took care to see that they fulfilled their religious duties punctually. Nowhere had a Jewish teacher of religion greater authority among his pupils than in this Catholic secondary school.) The teachers and most of the pupils came from what may be called the proletarian class and there was no discrimination with respect to wealth or family origin. But religion, morals, and discipline based on religion and morals, were taken most seriously. And it is precisely this which was not wanted by the communists, as, naturally, it cannot be wanted if they remain faithful to their materialistic Weltanschauung.

Their first and rather clever step to enable them to remain faithful Marxists in spite of appearances, was the introduction of the so-called “advisors in matters of Weltanschauung” into the schools. These are party members who see to it that the party’s leading principles prevail in the schools. How does this happen?

We find some instances quoted in the Catholic weekly, UJ EMBER, November 7, 194. In this issue, which was confiscated by the government, we read that in a girls’ school all the girls stood up as one person and declared to the teacher of religion that unless he showed them God and heaven and hell, they would not believe in them. This shows that girls who had previously attended faithfully the religion classes now, suddenly, almost from one day to the next, turned “atheists”. The “advisor” took care of them. When a complaint was launched with the director of the school, she answered:

“Teaching religion means fooling the people and fooling the people is against democracy”. In other schools the teacher of religion enters the classroom and finds that several of the students or all of them are absent. They had been ordered to do something else during the religion class. These instances are common and clearly indicate the government’s policy: to show the Churches that many boys and girls do not want to be educated in religion hence its teaching is to be made optional. Once this is

done, youth which is already organized in communist groups will be asked or threatened to stay away from religion both in school and church. The communist masters ordered their agents to see that boys and girls should not get contaminated by the men of religion, that is, they should not even speak to their former teachers.

For propaganda purposes it was important for the government to show that they were not against religion. Hence they said that teaching of religion in schools would remain compulsory. But they did everything they could to be able to show that they themselves were defeated by youth which did not want religion, which did not attend classes; what could they do, then, but to yield to youth, since, after all, their aim is to serve the people’s interests? The communist forces are, indeed, diabolical forces, if by the word “diabolical” we wish to designate something which is against God and His Commandments.

We can imagine what would have happened to priests and nuns who stayed on in former denominational schools: they would have been made ridiculous by their own pupils because of their religious convictions, and the ridiculing boys and girls would have been protected by the authorities, so much so that the teachers would have had to be transferred elsewhere, dispersed, and finally dismissed as non-competent. The Cardinal at least saved their personal honour.

To summarize the political and cultural scene in Hungary toward the end of 1948, we may say that the one-party political system was almost complete and the part of it which was still acting as a pseudo-opposition lived only by serving the government faithfully in socalled “non-political” spheres of interest, but spheres which at the same time were most important for the government as they served the government’s anti-religious program (e.g., Radicals, the newspaper Világ and others); the schools were nationalized, and became “officially” hostile to religious influences; the state-controlled radio made fun of the most sacred objects and events of religion, and workers, parents, and youth were ordered to protest loud-