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BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 31-2-173
TITLE:             Archbishop Grosz Responds to Arrests
BY:                Urban
DATE:              1961-3-10
COUNTRY:           Hungary
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  Hungarian Unit
THEMATIC SUBJECTS: Hungary--1956-1965, Church and State, Political Persecution

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RFE EVALUATION AND
ANALYSIS DEPARTMENT
Hungarian Unit

News Background

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X CURT-- H ARCHBISHOP GROSZ RESPONDS TO ARRESTS

Munich, March 10 (Urban) -- The letter Archbishop Grosz
is reported to have written to the Prime Minister, Mr. Muennich,
offering to go back to prison if the priests recently arrested are
not released, gives a new and unexpected turn to a crisis which
has been slowly coming to a head since the summer of last year.

In his letter (quoted by the British Catholic paper
"Universe", but otherwise as yet unconfirmed), the Archbishop, who
has himself suffered imprisonment, says that he knows personally
several of the arrested priests:

"These men have been associated with me for several years
and I personally stand for everything they have done. If these
take me into custody, to and put me together with my friends".

The Hungarian Catholio hierarchy, far from challenging
the regime on political issues, has been conspicuous since the 1956
Revolution for its cooperation with the temporal power. Much of
this has been due to a combination of government threats, bribes
and blackmail, but the cooperation has been none the less real,
causing the Church discomfort in its relations with the Holy See.

The Archbishop, who is deputizing for Cardinal Mindszenty,
has gone out of his way to come to terms with government policies,
including support of the Soviet "peace" campaign which involved
him in sharing a platform, and drafting declarations in common
with Hungary's excommunicated "peace priests". He has also been
criticized for his pronouncements on the collectivization of
agriculture, some of which were so shrouded in mystery that the
government has no difficulty in claiming that this universally detested
measure had the Church's blessing.

On his 70th birthday, and only two years after his release
from prison, the Archbishop was decorated with the Order of the
Banner "for resolving difficulties in the relations between the
state and the Roman Catholic Church and rendering great service to
the Peace Movement" -- a distinction he shares with Richard Horvath
and other fellow-traveling "peace priests".

Thus it was for no lack of trying on the part of the
episcopate that the present crisis could not be averted. Throughout
this time the regime has, of course, made no secret of its view that,
in a Communist society, religion, and especially the Catholic Church

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X CURT -- H -- (1) ARCHBISHOP GROSZ RESPONDS TO ARRESTS 
with its international "secretariat", is is an anachronism, and,
potentially at least, always insidious. The last two years have
seen a considerable increase in atheist propaganda, and the drive
for socialist rituals to replace baptism and the other Christian
sacraments has been given a fresh impetus.

Recently, however, this slow erosion of the Church's
authority was dramatically accelerated. Seminarists in Budapest
and Gyor were expelled and their teachers suspended for failing
to attend lectures given on the "peace movement" by Mssrs. Horvath,
Mag and other renegade clerics. This was followed by a number of
arrests, with homosexuality and the corruption of the young figuring high
on the list of official charges. On February 7, eight priests and
two lay persons were taken into custody and charged with conspiracy
against the state. Because they were named as ringleaders, it could
already be surmised that the arrests would not stop at that. For
the first time since 1956 it was officially stated that the detentions
had been made by the "Organs of the Ministry of the Interior",
admitting that the AVH was, in fact, back in operation.

With the eight priests were charged a Hungarian countess
and a former officer of the Hungarian Hunyadi Panzer Grenadiers,
a Hungarian-speaking voluntary unit of the SS, formed during the
final stages of the Second World War. The intention was clearly to
bring the Church into disrepute by putting the servants of God in
the dock in the company of an aristocrat and a Nazi. The priests
involved were also accused of immorally assaulting young acolytes,
the implication being that it is not only unwise for parents to
send children to Church, but that it is also dangerous.

The current wave of detentions, police questionings and
house-searches which are reported to be running into their thousands,
must be seen against a background of these preliminaries. Apart
from vicarages, the houses, flats or rooms of members of the
dissolved religious orders have also been searched. From the evidence
the police are trying to produce it would appear that the government
is anxious to show that under the umbrella of an outwardly cooperative
episcopate, a second Church is active underground.

There is nothing in Hungarian Communist law to make it
possible for the government to prosecute the clergy or non-clerical
persons for religious activity. In Church law once a monastic vow
has been taken, the dissolution of religious orders by temporal
authority does not absolve monks or nuns from their responsibilities.
The orders are directly under the control of their Generals in Rome
and, apart from reporting irregularities (if any) to their susperiors,
even the local Bishops have no power to interefere with the lives
of these communities. That the orders have preserved a sense of
spiritual cohesion since their members were forcibly ejected from
their religious houses would seem to be both natural and probably.

The government hopes to be able to prove that the
"underground" Church is underground also in the sense that it is seditious.
In that case it could hope to kill two birds with one stone: first,

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X CURT --H -- (2)ARCHBISHOP GROSZ RESPONDS TO ARRESTS 

it could discourage the "underground" and, secondly, it could
split the hierarchy from the lower clergy by demanding from the
Bishops that they should condemn their brothers for praying (to
put it quite simply) not only in Church, but also, as it were, in the
catacombs. This would cause the Bishops automatically to drift
into a position close to that of the "peace priests", and the
regime's long-term program, that of alienating the Vatican from
the Hungarian hierarchy, would be carried a step forward.

Archbishop Grosz's perhaps slightly belated, but vigorous,
stand has made the government's work very difficult. His plea to be
sent back to prison unless the campaign against the Church is stopped,
makes it possible for him to play a strong hand. For Kadar it would
be both embarrassing and unrewarding to arrest a man who had been put
in gaol at the same time as himself, on equally false charges and by the same
people under whom he himself had suffered torture and imprisonment.

It has been suggested that the present campaign in Hungary
(and Poland) indicates regained confidence on the part of Communist
leaders, shaken by the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution. There
may be some truth in this, but in Hungary at least it would seem more
likely that the regime is genuinely worried about its unpopularity.
One way of curing it would be to make fresh inroads into popular
thinking and weaken the Church wherever she in vulnerable. By
threatening the clergy with mass arrests, the regime may hope to
wring new concessions out of the Church, especially in the field of
education. It may also hope to show that at a time of agricultural
collectivization no softening in the ideological field will be
tolerated, least of all in those areas where the farmers and the
clergy are bound together by historic and trusted ties. But Kadar is
unlikely to feel strong enough openly to throw down the guantlet
to the Episcopate if the Archiboshop persists in his present
attitude.

If there is an "underground" Church in Hungary, it is
underground only inexactly the same sense in which the real message
of Christianity is subversive in all dictatorships.

End

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