"When God Is in Exile"

Early one day this week, the two Noble Guards in front of the Pope's private apartment clanked their halberds as they came to attention. Pope Pius appeared on the threshold, solemnly robed in a red velvet shoulder cape and a gold-embroidered stole.

Prelates and the commanders of the Noble, Swiss and Palatine Guards escorted him to the Hall of the Consistory. As soon as he ascended the papal throne, the Prefect of the APostolic Ceremonial asked all outsiders to leave. Then the prefect himself withdrew. In extraordinary consistory, the Pope was alone with 16 cardinals of the church who were seated on wooden benches around the throne. The Pope spoke to them in a quiet, incisive voice.

"I Shall Strike the Shepherd." Bluntly, he called Cardinal Mindszenty's arrest and sentence "a most serious outrage which inflicts a deep wound not only on your distinguished College and on the Church, but also every upholder of the dignity and liberty of man . . . The principal object of the trial was to disrupt the Catholic Church in Hungary and precisely for the purpose set forth in Sacred Scripture: 'I shall strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock shall be dispersed' ... Now that things have come to such a pass that this most worthy prelate has been . . . condemned like a criminal ... we cannot but [make a] solemn protest. . ."

Again & again the Pope implied that he was defending not only the rights of the Catholic Church, but generally the "rights of religion which this valiant prelate tirelessly propounded . . ." He cited the ''unanimous consensus of free peoples, expressed . . . even ... by those who do not belong to the Catholic Church . . ."

The Pope searingly rejected the Communist charge that, with the complicity of the Holy See, Mindszenty had plotted against the Hungarian government. But he defended Mindszenty's right to oppose his government on certain measures contradicting "divine and human rights." Said the Pope: "Bishops and the faithful themselves are bound by their own conscience to resist unjust laws."

"A Secret Influence." Thus the Pope supported the theory that some of Mindszenty's confessions in court merely referred to deeds which, as a Christian, he had been justified in committing. But, like the rest of the world, the Pope felt that this could not account for all of Mindszenty's behavior in court; for the cardinal had shown an attitude before his judges which seemed to contradict much of his earlier, passionate stubbornness on certain issues. This change, the Pope believed, was shown by the cardinal's "physical condition . . . which is indeed inexplicable except as a result of a secret influence which may not be publicly revealed."* He referred to the Cardinal in his ordeal: "A man endowed with the full vigor of a forceful nature suddenly appears so weak and mentally unbalanced . . ."

Of Mindszenty's tormentors the Pope said: "Let us all pray . . . that those who rashly dare to trample on the liberty of the Church and the rights of human conscience may at length understand that no civil society can endure when religion has been suppressed and God, as it were, driven into exile."

* This phrase in the Vatican's official transTation did not mean that the Pope knew what the Communists had done to Mindszenty but was not free to reveal it. In his Italian draft, the Pope used the phrase influenze inconjessabili--unspeakable influences. What these were, said a Vatican official, the Pope did not know.

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