Embattled Prelate
PUGSLEY, ROBERT A.
Embattled Prelate Memoirs By Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty Macmillan. 480 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Robert A. Pugsley Director, Peace Education Programs for the Christophers, New York City Here in...
...The book's final chapter, relating succinctly and without self-pity the ultimate tragedy of a long and painful life, reveals that during the discussions Mindszenty wrote to President Nixon requesting permission to remain, but that the U.S...
...A year later he remains in limbo...
...he never acknowledges the politics that flowed from his religious beliefs, the quite conservative ideological assumptions that have always made him and his life's work unpopular with the Left...
...The Nazis jailed him in 1944 for his public efforts on behalf of threatened Jews...
...In an important sense, therefore, this volume is the story of a futile rearguard struggle by a loyal son of the Church and a proud Hungarian nationalist to preserve a rapidly fading religio-social order...
...It was not long before certain of his statements caused the Hungarian authorities to protest strongly to the Vatican...
...the Vatican publicly announced Mindszenty's removal on February 5, 1974, the 25th anniversary of his show trial...
...made [for] my departure from Hungary...
...Mindszenty was enthroned as Archbishop of Eszertgom and Primate of Hungary by Pope Pius XII in 1945, when that country stood at the medieval crossroads of ecclesiastical and secular authority...
...The climax was not long in coming: On December 18, the 25th anniversary of Mindszenty's arrest by the Communists, he received a papal letter declaring the archepiscopal see of Eszertgom vacant...
...In September 1971, following three-way negotiations between the Cardinal, the Vatican and the Hungarian government, the prelate was granted permission to leave the American embassy...
...These memoirs take us through his arrest, torture and show trial in 1949, and his subsequent seven years' incarceration for treason against the Communist regime...
...I would have asked the Holy Father to rescind all the arrangements...
...During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Cardinal regained his freedom for four days, only to have to seek asylum at the American embassy in Budapest when the Soviets crushed the uprising...
...For the next 15 years he remained within the protective enclave of the embassy building, unable even to attend his mother's funeral in 1960, burdened with the knowledge that to step outside was to invite certain imprisonment and, given his damaged health, probable death...
...leader advised him to bow to fate...
...Free at last, Mindszenty went to Rome, where Pope Paul VI assured him of protection in his endeavors to write and speak openly...
...In the summer of 1973, Mindszenty tells us, he submitted his manuscript to Pope Paul, who was reluctant to have it brought out for fear of offending the Hungarian government...
...Similarly, Mindszenty fails even to question the Church's own claim of being above politics and decisions based on expediency...
...Mindszenty writes: "Had I known about any guarantee of this sort...
...Reviewed by Robert A. Pugsley Director, Peace Education Programs for the Christophers, New York City Here in his own words is Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty's life, the chronicle of one man's defense of religious and civil liberties against modern suppression...
...Now 82 years old, and a resident of the Pazmaneum seminary in Vienna, he has been relegated to the status of wandering exile by a Pope and an ex-President of the United States who, in their dealings with the Soviet Union and the nations of Eastern Europe, came to regard him as a political embarrassment...
...The following day, the Cardinal stated that in the light of the grave circumstances facing the Church in Hungary, he could not in good conscience step down...
...In October 1972, the papal nuncio in Vienna disclosed to Mindszenty that the Holy See had, the preceding year, given the Hungarian Communists a pledge that the Cardinal would not do or say anything displeasing to them...
...Yet, in recounting these experiences, Mindszenty portrays himself solely as a spiritual leader...
...This consistent refusal to recognize and express these underlying implications constitutes the book's principal shortcoming...
...Mindszenty answered that, for the same reasons he had endured years of imprisonment, he could not comply...
...He seems either unaware or unconcerned that throughout its history the Church has frequently supported, or refrained from opposing, atrocities and injustices hardly different from those visited upon Hungary...
...When the Cardinal stood firm, and Budapest learned of the planned publication, it pressured the Pope, under terms of the secret agreement, to remove the Primate from his archepiscopal office...
...When he was released following the German withdrawal, Mindszenty harbored few illusions about his Soviet liberators, and soon he was left with none...
...A few months later, the Pope, "with bitter reluctance," requested that the Cardinal abdicate...
...Mindszenty replied that he could not, on principle, accept this decision, and asked the Pope to rescind it...
...In the course of a controversial and embattled career, Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty had come to expect the full measure of political and religious persecution that he received at the hands of his totalitarian enemies...
...Never did he foresee his final, tragically ironic fate, brought about by the very church in whose service he had spent his life...
...On the other hand, the Cardinal was an implacable opponent of 20th-century totalitarianism in both of its major forms...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 5
