MEMOIRS OF A MODERN 'MARTYR'

...If he wished to hold on to his office it was not out of any personal inclination but as a sign that in Hungary neither church nor nation was free...

...For a man already in his late fifties Mindszenty was remarkably tough and resilient and resisted his interrogators for several weeks...

...He is widely read in European literature and philosophy, but the larger implications of, say, Catholic-Marxist dialogue are inaccessible to him, since for very good personal and historical reasons he equates Marxism with Stalinism and its successors...

...Soon after he arrived in Rome he was assured by the Holy Father, "You are and remain Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary...

...Even then, had he known of a secret undertaking from Rome to Budapest that the Cardinal would do nothing to annoy the Hungarian Government once he left the country, he would certainly not have agreed...

...Memoirs, P. 172 methods of brain-washing...

...And on the anniversary of his trial the announcement was made public...

...he is totally opposed to Communism, of whatever variety, and does not believe that detente or coexistence can achieve anything worthwhile...

...When the war ended and Mindszenty was once more at liberty, Pius XII appointed him Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary...

...His book concludes, "This is the path I travelled to the end, and this is how I arrived at complete and total exile...

...But Mindszenty is, it seems to me, right too in standing unshakably firm on the principles for which he underwent torture and imprisonment...

...And in 1944, during the final months of the Second World War, he was once more imprisoned, this time by the Hungarian Nazis, following a characteristically sharp letter from BERNARD BERGONZI Mindszenty to the head of the fascist government, urging that peace be made...

...indeed, such pragmatic accommodations are a traditional Roman policy...

...In a sense, of course, the Vatican was right in wanting to get the best deal possible for the Church in Hungary, however imperfect...

...Once in the West he refused to be silent, and as a result was treated with considerable duplicity, even shabbiness by the Vatican...

...But this was too much for the Communist government, now dealing with complaisant bishops who were prepared to surrender religious education and the freedom of Catholic institutions-points of which Mindszenty had refused to compromise -in order to preserve some degree of freedom of worship, however circumscribed...

...But whatever his rigidities of temperament and limitations of horizon Mindszenty is of the stuff of martyrs...

...But still Mindszenty had the last, defiant word, in a public statement insisting that he had not retired but been sacked...

...By 1948 Mindszenty was already an authority on prisons...

...As a prisoner Mindszenty was clearly an embarrassment to the Communists, and when the Stalin era ended they were ready to grant him a pardon and let him leave the country...

...He helps...

...As a young priest he had been imprisoned for a few weeks in 1919 during Bela Kun's Communist regime...

...he left in 1971 only with very great reluctance and following prolonged pressure from Rome...

...He is, as his book makes clear, an uncomfortably old-fashioned, pre-conciliar Catholic: conservative, clericalist, triumphalist, and manifesting a potent blend of Magyar nationalism and Marian devotion that was not at all to my taste...

...As a memorable work of prison literature Mindszenty's Memoirs can, as the publishers claim, stand comparison with Koestler and Solzhenitsyn...

...During those years the world changed but Mindszenty did not...

...And his is a rarer kind of right ness...

...If Mindszenty had died in jail, or been executed by the Russians like other Hungarian leaders, following his brief liberty during the revolution of 1956, he would have secured a place in history as a martyr, even a possible candidate for canonization...

...There is a tense dramatic sense of developing nemesis in Mindszenty's history of the years from 1945 to 1948, which is totally gripping even though one knows the outcome...

...But two years later, precisely on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his arrest, the Pope told Mindszenty that the seat of Esztergom was now vacant...

...His subsequent fifteen years of voluntary incarceration inside the American Embassy in Budapest were a long anti-climax, when Mindszenty was neither genuinely in nor out of his own country...

...Later he came to comfort me a second time...

...BOOKS MEMOIRS OF A MODERN 'MARTYR' Memoirs JOZSEF CARDINAL MINDSZENTY Macmillan, $10 Once a hero, Cardinal Mindszenty lived long enough to be an embarrassment, not only to the Hungarian Government, which imprisoned him in 1949, but also to the Vatican, which found him an obstacle to its plans for co-existence with the Communist world...

...Soon afterwards Mindszenty was arrested and after a show trial he did, in part, confess...

...In 1949, at the very time that hatred was dominant, an auxiliary policeman slipped into my cell when the others were already asleep, looked around cautiously, and whispered: Father, trust in God...

...Mindszenty himself had no doubts about his fate...

...At the time in the West it was assumed that this confession, like those of Stalin's other innumerable victims, was extracted by fairly sophisticated Even in Hungarian communist prisons things happened that wrenched the heart...

...He continued to uphold unflinchingly, as he did until his death, the defiiant stance he adopt-ted in 1948 at the time of his arrest by Stalin's Hungarian agents...

...such a confession could only be extracted under duress...

...He needed to be tough in mind and body to survive the years of imprisonment, about which he writes with great objectivity and some humor...

...The result is deliberately calculated to displease a good many people, in the Vatican as well as in Hungary...

...But Mindszenty had no intention of asking for a pardon, he expected full rehabilitation and restoration to his post as Primate of Hungary...

...The third time he came to bid good-bye, for he was being transferred...

...Mindszenty made the same stand during his years in the American Embassy...

...At a time when Catholics, like everyone else, are much inclined to the virtues of compromise, pragmatism, accommodation, dialogue, Mindszenty stands out as a figure of immense courage and lonely moral grandeur, defying the world for what he believes to be right...

...and that quality, even in an updated, progressive, pluralist Catholic Church, is of exemplary and absolute value.absolute value...

...late in 1948 he issued a statement disowning in advance any subsequent confession of crimes against the state...

...In these remarkable memoirs, which are one positive result of his years in the embassy, he argues a persuasive case as well as unfolding a compelling life story...

...Then followed years of struggle against the Communists, who were at first merely one party in the fragile democratic state set up in 1945, but who by familiar methods of subversion, blackmail and open terror were finally able to take over the apparatus of the state...

...In fact, prolonged simple brutality-constant beatings and sleeplessness-combined with drugs was enough to make the victim crack and sign a bogus confession...

...Mindszenty gives a vivid account of the process, every step of which he opposed in pastoral letters and sermons...