Saints and Sinners
Cardinal Mindszenty at his show trial in 1949-Fortepan/Fortepan/Album045
In the month a new pope was elected in Rome, the Catholic Church in Hungary celebrated the anniversary of the death of Cardinal Mindszenty. This brave and outspoken priest was an international symbol of resistance to authoritarianism during the twentieth century, and his name is which one most Hungarians still recognise today. At the celebratory mass held in the Budapest Basilica two weeks ago, people attended from across the country, including 300 children attending church schools.
The mass marked the 110th anniversary of József Mindszenty’s ordination as priest, the 80th of his appointment as Archbishop and the 50th of his death in May 1975. Never a man to hold back his opinions, he paid the price for his openness. Over the longevity of his religious career, he was unique in being arrested or imprisoned by four different governments in Hungary. Granted, two of them were of a similar, Soviet nature.
Firstly, in February 1919, he was arrested by Mihály Károlyi's Social Democratic government for criticising its ‘socialist policies’. In July of the same year, he was rearrested by the Béla Kun government that led the short-lived Soviet Republic. He survived the period of ‘red terror’ and worked as a priest in the west of Hungary for the next twenty years.
In March 1944, he was consecrated as Bishop of Veszprém. That same month saw Nazi Germany invade Hungary. Mindszenty wrote to the German authorities asking them not to fight in Western Hungary and also asked Regent Horthy to protect converted Jews. Once Horthy fell and Eichmann installed the fascistic Arrow Cross government of Ferenc Szálasi, Hungary’s Jewish community became endangered. Mindszenty was arrested and imprisoned by the government for opposing the persecution and deportation of Jews. He was eventually released from house arrest as the Szálasi regime collapsed during the closing stage of World War Two.
In a shattered country undergoing the highest inflation ever experienced in world history, communist forces gradually overcame attempts to create a democratic state. Salami tactics saw one slice of democracy being removed after the other, with the backing of the Russian tanks that had at first liberated the country, remaining to ensure Hungary’s future would be behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1945 Mindszenty was consecrated as Cardinal, Archbishop of Esztergom, the Prince Primate of Hungary and leader of the country’s Catholic Church. He proved to be an outspoken critic of ‘Bolshevism’, as he described the regime led by Hungarian communists, some of whom had escaped Hungary in 1919 as the Soviet republic collapsed. Mátyás Rákosi and others now returned from Moscow equipped with the full ideological mindset to overhaul Hungarian society, with religion as a key target.
Over the next four years Mindszenty clashed with the communists over political and spiritual matters. In particular he protested the confiscation of religious schools and the systematic assault on civil and religious liberty. He was eventually arrested and imprisoned in the Conti utca prison, run by the state security service, the ÁVO. Of the three small squares in Budapest named after the Cardinal, one is located close to where the prison stood.
Mindszenty square in District 8, Budapest-close to where he was imprisoned in 1949
He later suffered torture and drugging in the headquarters of the ÁVO at Andrássy út 60. This Budapest address had also been used earlier for imprisonment and torture by the Arrow Cross. The building was repurposed as the Terror Háza museum after communism collapsed, revealing the intimidation and murder experienced by many alleged enemies of the state. It continues to offer a chilling reminder of the horrors of authoritarianism. One corridor reveals what happened to the Hungarian primate during those dark days. The false confession extracted from Mindszenty in this building became the key evidence at his show trial in 1949, when he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mindszenty’s motto was ‘If there are a million praying Hungarians, I am not afraid of tomorrow.’
He was freed from prison during the revolution of 1956. When the communists regained control after ten days, he received political asylum in the US embassy in Budapest. He spent the next fifteen years there voluntarily, with his presence eventually proving an embarrassment as he often criticised the Papacy’s attempts to deal with Hungary’s communist regime. He only left at the request of the Vatican and US President Richard Nixon. Initially, he became a guest of the Pope in Rome and later moved to Vienna. The Vatican retired him in 1974, relieving him of his posts as archbishop and primate of Hungary.
Cardinal Mindszenty speaking to the Hungarian people after his release from prison during the 1956 revolution- Fortepan/Fortepan/Album 045
Hollywood was fascinated by this man of resistance. The 1950 American film Guilty of Treason was partly based on his personal papers and starred Charles Bickford. The 1955 British thriller The Prisoner is loosely based on Mindszenty's imprisonment, with Alec Guinness playing a fictionalised version of the cardinal. A two-part 1966 episode "Old Man Out" of television's Mission: Impossible was loosely based on the Hungarian dissident. The episode's premise was that a Catholic cardinal, a political prisoner and hero to his people, awaited execution in an Eastern European prison. The series' protagonists were tasked with smuggling him out of the prison and country before his execution.
Originally, buried in Austria following his death in 1975, Mindszenty was reburied in the Basilica in Esztergom in 1991. Mindszenty’s case for sainthood started in Catholic circles in 1993, and Pope Francis declared him Venerable in 2019 – a title accorded to holy persons for their spiritual perfection and wisdom. Some church scholars argue that this is the greatest hurdle to clear in the process of achieving sainthood. Masses for the beatification of the Cardinal are said regularly at the Városmajor church in Budapest and the basilica in Eger. This is the next stage of canonisation before sainthood can be achieved. József Mindszenty remains a leading candidate to become Hungary’s next saint.
Commemoration service for Cardinal Mindszenty, April 2025- Városmajor park, Budapest
Sources - The Mindszenty Foundation, Wikipedia and the open source Fortepan photographic library.