József Mindszenty is often commemorated as one of the first victims of the Rákosi regime. However, his 1949 arrest and show trial were not the last stage of his ‘white martyrdom’: he spent one and a half decades as an asylee at the US Embassy in Budapest, only to be exiled from the country for good in 1971.
Cardinal Mindszenty played an important role in the 1956 revolution. He assumed his post as archbishop immediately after his release from captivity, appealed for international aid for Hungary, initiated the process of cleaning the church from Communist infiltration, while also being active in the political life of the country. Firmly holding onto his conservative view of himself as the most important dignitary of Hungary, he tried to set the direction of the course of events. Contrary to the recent myth-busting efforts, this direction was not reactionary or outdated.
When Arrow Cross dictator Ferenc Szálasi took over on 15 October 1944, the new authorities required all civil servants to pledge allegiance to them. It was then that Mindszenty prepared a document entitled ‘Juramentum non’ (‘no oath’ in Latin.) The motto of the document was: ‘One cannot serve the [Arrow Cross] revolution and the Church at the same time.’
An in-depth interview with German teacher Gergely Tóth, who went to the University of Berkeley, California 26 years ago for a doctoral program, then soon became immersed in local Hungarian community life. Since then, his voluntary work has extended from making oral history interviews to photographing objects and markers on four continents and collecting archival material of the Hungarian diaspora.
‘The importance of the Orthodox rite of St Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of the 2,300-metre Mount Sinai (Jebel Musa, also known as Horeb) in the Sinai Peninsula grew only after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 and the fall of the Latin states in the Holy Land in 1291…It is the oldest monastery in the world to have survived in this way, where, among other things, the oldest 4th-century Greek-language manuscript of the Bible, the Codex Siniaticus, has also been preserved.’
During his speech on the 68th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution and Freedom Fight, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned against foreign control, vowing to defend Hungary’s sovereignty. He emphasized the importance of national unity in the face of external pressures, and stated that Hungarians will not tolerate Hungary being turned into a puppet state of Brussels.
‘The Hungarian people, who cherish freedom, will do everything in their power to defend their sovereignty. Just as in 1956, when we were the first Eastern European country under communist dictatorship to stand up against Moscow, Hungary is now leading the fight for freedom against the oppression of Brussels.’
In 1989 scouting became again legally permitted in Hungary. Consequently, the émigré Hungarian Scout Association changed its name to the current one: Hungarian Scout Association in Exteris. Nowadays it comprises more than 70 troops on four continents, in 14 countries, organized into five districts (Western Europe, South America, USA, Australia and Canada), with a total of 2,950 members.
The French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the emergence of capitalism, and the development of the first nation-states put both Protestant and Catholic churches in a position they could never have dreamed of a few decades before. Even though reconciliation between state and church came fast, these events served as a Rubicon in Western history and civilization. The clergy, regardless of its faith, had to rediscover itself in a totally different political and socio-cultural environment. The insightful book Theologians on Modern Politics, presented on 4 June, attempts to demonstrate the changing nature of both religious institutions and the faith itself, which allowed Christian ideas and communities to remain key players in modern politics.
Vilmos Apor is known as the Bishop of the Poor, and as the martyred prelate who was fatally wounded defending the girls and women under his protection from Soviet soldiers on the Good Friday of 1945.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.