Surrender

One year and a half after Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty went to prison, for refusing to come to terms with the Communists, Hungary's Roman Catholic bishops gave in to the Red regime.

Better Than No Church. The Hungarian government announced last week that the Hungarian Bench of Bishops had agreed 1) to "acknowledge and support" the Communist constitution; 2) to take steps against priests who direct their activities against "the legal order"; 3) to request Roman Catholics to "take part in the great work" of Red Hungary; 4) to support the phony peace petition which the Communists are circulating the world over. In exchange, the Hungarian state promised to support the church financially for the next 18 years, to guarantee "complete freedom of religion," and to return to the church eight parochial schools it had closed.

The man who signed on behalf of the Bench of Bishops was no habitual appeaser. He was Archbishop Joseph Grosz of Kalocsa, a 63-year-old churchman whose character and courage are above question. When in 1945 Nazi bullies broke into his palace at Kalocsa and ordered him with drawn machine guns to get out of town, said Grosz: "I can face any kind of machine gun and if necessary I can even die at this desk." The Nazis left and the archbishop stayed.

Why did the bishops surrender after two years of valiant resistance? Because the alternative would have been complete liquidation of the church in Hungary. Last June the Communists showed that they would stop at nothing, when they raided Catholic monasteries and convents, imprisoned monks and nuns by the thousands. Soon afterwards the bishops started to negotiate. They had decided that a church with some liberties, however limited, was preferable to no church at all. The negotiations went forward slowly, and they were surrounded by elaborate propaganda designed to prepare for the ultimate decision. Early last month a conference of Hungary's Roman Catholic clergy convened in Budapest, to seize "a great historical opportunity for pacification between church and state." A Cistercian monk named Richard Horvath told the assembled priests: "Thank God the new era has arrived--the age of socialism."

When the agreement was finally concluded last week, the Vatican announced that it knew nothing about it. The bishops had apparently not been allowed to report to the Vatican. Explained a high Vatican spokesman: "It is possible that the Hungarian bishops, in order to save what still can be saved, may have entered into an 'understanding' with the government. But to magnify such a local understanding into a solemn agreement between church and state is gross exaggeration." Such an agreement could be signed only by a fully empowered emissary from the Holy See; no such emissary has gone (or could go) behind the Iron Curtain.

Losing Battle. "Local understandings" similar to the Hungarian agreements have been made by Catholic clergymen with the Communistic governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Vatican reported last week that five of the Czech bishops who were supposed to have signed an agreement with the state last year are actually in jail. Adam Cardinal Sapieha did not sign the Polish agreement, and has not been able to communicate with the Vatican for months.

In spite of Mindszenty's sacrifice, it seemed clear that the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe was losing its struggle with the Kremlin.

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