József Cardinal Mindszenty’s memoir is an epic of the great suffering of the Hungarian nation and of this man’s participation in it, out of his love for his people, his Church, and his God. In addition to the cruelties of totally repugnant totalitarianism, he endured abandonment by the Church, culminating in heartbreaking treatment by the pope himself. The book ends darkly, not in despair, but in the clear understanding that crushing injustice is the rule in this world and that justice must wait for the next world.
Memoirs by József Cardinal Mindszenty (477 pages, Ignatius Press, 2023; original German ed. Verlag Ullstein, 1974; English trans. 1974 Macmillan Publishing)
József Mindszenty, 1892-1975, primate of Hungary from 1945 and Cardinal from 1946 until 1974, was a man of astonishing energy and accomplishments and of uncompromising courage in the face of hardship and persecution. His memoirs are sobering in content and austere in style. First published in 1974, Memoirs was written “so that the world may see the fate that Communism has in store for mankind…. Communism does not respect the dignity of man; I shall describe my cross only to direct the eyes of the world to Hungary’s cross and that of her Church.” The memoirs’ structure fulfills this intention: Mindszenty’s account of his first twenty-five years of service to the Church, years of energetic and largely happy work as a curate and parish priest, fills only a few densely written but highly informative pages; his account of the subsequent twenty-four years of his life and that of the Hungarian Church and people under the Communists fill nearly 300 pages.
His book is an epic of the great suffering of the Hungarian nation and of this man’s participation in it out of his love for his people, his Church, and his God. His style is clean and unadorned, and his telling of events is almost unbearably truthful and completely lacking in self-promotion. The injustices, outrages, and oppression endured by the Hungarians at the hands of both the Nazis and the Communists—and by the author personally—are deeply felt, but the emotion is contained and constrained by facts and analysis. In addition to the cruelties of totally repugnant totalitarianism, he endured abandonment by the Church, culminating in heartbreaking treatment by the pope himself. The book ends darkly, not in despair, which is not the path of this man, but in the clear understanding that crushing injustice is the rule in this world and that justice—which will come—must wait for the next world.
Mindszenty’s family had deep roots in Vas and Zala counties of western Hungary, where he was educated and ordained, and began his work as a priest in 1915. He loved the priesthood and threw himself into both the sacramental and pastoral aspects of his calling. Dismayed by the high rate of illiteracy in Zala County, he founded schools and convents, established new parish churches, supported hospitals and missions, founded a newspaper, and promoted family apostolates and sodalities for the youth. Unhappy with the social distance that so often separated priests from their flock, he personally visited many homes and learned to know his parishioners, who came to esteem him warmly. He engaged in the cultural and political life of the region, though he refused to run for office when pressed by his friends: “I regarded politics as a necessary evil in the life of a priest. Because politics can overturn the altar and imperil immortal souls, however, I have always felt it necessary for a minister to keep himself well-informed about the realm of party politics.” He was imprisoned for several months in 1919 when Hungary was briefly under Communist rule, then resumed his work as a priest.
He was ordained bishop of Veszprém, one of the most historically significant Christian cities in Hungary in 1944, ten days after the Nazis moved into Hungary. Imprisoned by the Nazis for several weeks in the spring of 1945, he was released as the Soviets moved into Hungary. On 15 September 1945, Mindszenty was appointed Primate of Hungary and Archbishop of Esztergom. He spent the next four years resisting the Communist aggression against the Hungarian people and the Catholic faith. He was arrested again late in 1948. This moment proved to be a turning point. The remaining years of his life he lived under the shadow of Communism, either in prison, in confinement in the U.S. embassy in Budapest, or in exile in Austria. His life changed from one of multi-faceted, active service to the Church to one of sharing, through great suffering in body and extreme anguish of soul, in the persecution of his nation and of the Church in Hungary. The memoir becomes an epic of the Passion of Hungary and of this man’s participation in it out of love for his people and his God.
In the early weeks of his imprisonment by the Communists, he was subjected to relentless beatings, to extreme personal humiliation, and to mind-altering drugs, with the intention of extracting from him a confession of conspiracy and treason. His conviction and sentence of life imprisonment in 1949 were the outcome of a cardboard show-trial, based on patently falsified evidence and lacking in any effort by the defense. For the next eight years he was in solitary confinement in succession of Hungarian prisons, designed to destroy both mind and body and to break the spirit. Mindszenty refused to cooperate in any way with the Communists and spoke out to protest Communist oppression whenever he had opportunity, thus winning no concessions or favors from his captors. The Cardinal details the horrendous conditions of physical and psychological abuse he endured in prison, reserving some graphic material for the sake of decency. He exposes the wicked cruelties of Communist practice and thus the falseness of Communist ideology. His health suffered greatly in prison, but, astoundingly, his intellectual and spiritual life were not extinguished. He managed to obtain and read many books from prison libraries; he prayed the breviary and multiple daily rosaries; he celebrated Mass in his cell on the rare occasions when circumstances permitted. Prison visits by his devout and devoted mother, at that time in her 70s and 80s, were one of his most precious supports; his deep love for her pervades his book. In spite of the degradations of prison life, he was not without a mordant sense of humor, which he directed at prison guards and government officials in his exchanges with them.
During the brief revolution of October 1956, Mindszenty was moved from prison to the American Embassy in Budapest; there he stayed until 1971, with far better treatment than in prison but with very limited possibilities of communication with the outside world. In 1971, under pressure from the Holy See (in turn pressured by the Communists), he left the embassy and was sent to the Pázmáneum, an institute in Vienna for Hungarian students of theology. From there, with no assistance from the Holy See, he went on visits to Hungarian exiles in various parts of the world, to encourage them in their faith—this his while he was in his 80s and with the compromised health bequeathed to him by prison. On his travels he spoke to the media of the plight of Hungary under the Communists. Not surprisingly, the Communists pressured the Holy See to strip him of his title as primate of Hungary and archbishop of Esztergom, which Paul VI did in 1974, perhaps in part as a gesture of cooperation with Western detente. Mindszenty died the following year, abandonned by the Church and in exile from his beloved country. The last sentence of his memoirs expresses a grim reality: “This is the path I traveled to the end and this is how I arrived at complete and total exile.”
In justice to this great man, I can end my review of his Memoirs on no other note.
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