József Mindszenty
Venerable József Mindszenty | |
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Cardinal priest | |
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Born | József Pehm March 29, 1892 |
Died | 6 May 1975 Vienna, Austria | (aged 83)
Buried | Esztergom Basilica |
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József Mindszenty (Hungarian pronunciation:
After eight years in prison, Mindszenty was freed in the
Early life and career
Mindszenty was born on 29 March 1892 in Csehimindszent, Vas County, Austria-Hungary, to József Pehm and Borbála Kovács. His father was a magistrate.[3] He attended St Norbert's Premonstratensian High Grammar School in Szombathely, before entering the Szombathely Diocesan Seminary in 1911.[4]
Mindszenty was ordained a priest by Bishop János Mikes on 12 June 1915, the Feast of the Sacred Heart. In 1917, the first of his books, Motherhood, was published. He was arrested by Mihály Károlyi's socialist government on 9 February 1919 for speaking out against its 'socialist policies', then rearrested by the communist Béla Kun government on 31 July that year.[5][6]
In 1939, Mindszenty urged his followers to vote against the Arrow Cross Party. In 1940, he published a pamphlet, "The Green Communism", in which he characterised the Hungarian Nyilas Nazi Movement as diabolic and as evil as the communists. Green was the colour of the Nyilas uniform.[7]
In 1941, during a
Church leader and opposition to communism
Following the fall of the
To the ruling
Cardinal Mindszenty believed and preached that "The Church asks for no secular protection; it seeks shelter under the protection of God alone".
In 1948, religious orders were banned by the government. Soon after, the communist dictator in Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi (born Mátyás Rosenfeld) accused the Cardinal and the Catholic Church of being both "the largest landowner in Hungary" and "a reactionary force in our country, supporting the monarchy and later the fascist dictatorship of Admiral Horthy". These, Rákosi claimed, were the only reasons for Mindszenty's opposition to the Party's policy of land confiscation.[16]
On 26 December 1948, Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested and accused of
Mindszenty's
Almost alone among the
On 3 February 1949, Mindszenty's show trial began. The Cardinal admitted to being involved in a Habsburg restorationist organization which planned to form a government after an American invasion, however he denied hoping for the outbreak of war. He said "we prayed for peace". He accepted the charges of smuggling tens of thousands of dollars into Hungary, and admitted his contacts with Otto von Habsburg and American politicians, but did not admit to willful espionage on behalf of foreign powers. In court, Mindszenty said about the charges: "I do not deny one or another part of it, but I do not subscribe to the conclusion".[20] As he followed the trial, a weeping Pope Pius XII told Sister Pascalina Lehnert, "My words have come true and all I can do is pray; I cannot help him any other way."[21] On 8 February, Mindszenty was sentenced to life imprisonment for black marketeering, treason and espionage. The government released a white book, Documents on the Mindszenty Case, containing his alleged confessions and case materials.
On 12 February 1949, Pope Pius XII announced the excommunication of all persons involved in the trial and conviction of Mindszenty. On 20 February 1949, the Pope addressed a series of questions to a crowd which had gathered in St. Peter's Square to protest the Cardinal's show trial, asking:
Do you want a Church that remains silent when She should speak; that diminishes the law of God where She is called to proclaim it loudly, wanting to accommodate it to the will of man? Do you want a Church that departs from the unshakable foundations upon which Christ founded Her, taking the easy way of adapting Herself to the opinion of the day; a Church that is a prey to current trends; a Church that does not condemn the suppression of conscience and does not stand up for the just liberty of the people; a Church that locks Herself up within the four walls of Her temple in unseemly sycophancy, forgetting the divine mission received from Christ: 'Go out the crossroads and preach the people'? Beloved sons and daughters! Spiritual heirs of numberless confessors and martyrs! Is this the Church you venerate and love? Would you recognize in such a Church the features of your Mother? Would you be able to imagine a Successor of St. Peter submitting to such demands?[21]
According to Sister Pascalina, who witnessed the rally, "In reply to the Holy Father came a single cry like thunder still ringing in our ears: 'No!'"[21]
In
Over seven years later, on 30 October 1956, in the midst of the
Confinement at the US embassy
On 4 November 1956, when the Soviet Union
György Aczél, the communist official in charge of all cultural and religious matters in Hungary, felt increasingly uncomfortable about Mindszenty's plight in the late 1960s when the latter fell seriously ill and rumors spread of his impending death. Yet Aczél failed to convince party leader János Kádár that commuting Mindszenty's sentence would create valuable confusion in the Holy See and allow the state to better control the remaining clergy.
Exile
Eventually, Pope Paul VI offered a compromise: declaring Mindszenty a "victim of history" (instead of communism) and annulling the excommunication imposed on the people involved in his trial. The Hungarian government allowed Mindszenty to leave the country on 28 September 1971.[23] [24] Beginning on 23 October 1971, he lived in Vienna, Austria, as he took offence at Rome's advice that he should resign from the primacy of the Catholic Church in Hungary in exchange for uncensored publication of his memoirs backed by the Holy See. Although most bishops retire at or near age 75, Mindszenty continually denied rumors of his resignation and was not required by canon law to step down at the time.
In December 1973, at the age of 81, Mindszenty was stripped of his titles by the Pope, who declared the Archdiocese of Esztergom officially vacated, but who refused to fill the seat while Mindszenty was still alive. Mindszenty visited Hungarian emigrants in 1975 in Caracas, Venezuela, and then Bogotá, Colombia. Just after this visit, he traveled back to Europe feeling quite ill. Mindszenty died on 6 May 1975, at the age of 83, in exile in Vienna. In early 1976, the Pope made Bishop László Lékai the primate of Hungary, ending a long struggle with the communist government.
Legacy
In 1991, Mindszenty's remains were repatriated to Esztergom by the newly elected government and buried in the basilica there.
Mindszenty is widely admired in modern-day Hungary for his courage and resolve while opposing the Arrow Cross Party, during Communist imprisonment, and in exile.[citation needed]
The Mindszenty Museum in Esztergom is dedicated to the life of the Cardinal. A commemorative statue of Cardinal Mindszenty stands at St. Ladislaus Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey, US.[25] A monument was donated by the Hungarian community of Greater Cleveland in 1977 and stands at Cardinal Mindszenty Plaza in downtown Cleveland.[citation needed] Mindszenty is remembered in Santiago, Chile with a memorial in Parque Bustamante, the same park where a monument to the martyrs of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution stands.[citation needed]
In June 1974, Cardinal Mindszenty visited the Woodside Priory School[26] in Portola Valley, California. The school was founded by seven Hungarian Benedictine monks, associated with Saint Martin's Archabbey in Pannonhalma, who fled the repression in Hungary following the 1956 revolution. A bronze memorial was placed on the school's campus noting his visit.[citation needed] The Cardinal's visit to the San Francisco Bay Area included Mass in December 1974 at St. Raymond Church in Menlo Park, California; a monument commemorating the service was placed on parish grounds.[27]
Beatification process
The beatification and eventual canonization of Cardinal Mindszenty has been on the Hungarian Catholic Church's agenda ever since communism fell in 1989, and the 2005–2013 pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI was seen by many analysts as an excellent opportunity to achieve both, as the Pope had commented favourably on Mindszenty's calling and legacy.
The cause for the cardinal's beatification opened on 15 June 1993; Mindszenty became titled as a
Pope Francis declared Mindszenty venerable on 12 February 2019.[30]
In popular culture
Mindszenty's life and battle against the Soviet domination of Hungary and communism were the subject of the 1950 American film Guilty of Treason, partly based on his personal papers and starring Charles Bickford as the cardinal.
The 1955 British thriller The Prisoner is loosely based on Mindszenty's imprisonment, with Alec Guinness playing a fictionalized version of the cardinal.[31]
Mindszenty is reported to have disliked at least one of his film portrayals.[2]
The two-part 1966 episode "Old Man Out" of television's Mission: Impossible was loosely based on Mindszenty. The episode's premise was that a Catholic cardinal, a political prisoner and hero to his people, was slated for execution in an Eastern European prison. The series' protagonists were tasked with smuggling him out of the prison and country before his execution.
See also
- Josef Beran
- John Fisher
- Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei
- Josyf Slipyj
- Alojzije Stepinac
- Stefan Wyszyński
- List of Eastern Bloc defectors
- List of people granted political asylum
- The Black Book of Communism
References
- ^ "József Mindszenty". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 12 March 2013.
- ^ a b c Last, Alex (5 September 2012). "Fifteen years holed up in an embassy". BBC. Retrieved 12 March 2013.
- ^ Mindszenty, József Cardinal (1974). Memoirs. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.
- ^ "József Mindszenty (1892–1975)". National Széchényi Library. Retrieved 12 March 2013.
- ISBN 9780225668834. Retrieved 29 October 2016.
- ^ Mindszenty, József Cardinal. Memoirs. pp. 3–8. 1974. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
- ^ Paksy, pp. 213–215.
- ^ "Software & Services". www.freeweb.hu. Archived from the original on 9 May 2006.
- ^ "Two Visits — Two Eras: The Canadian Tours of Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, 1947 and 1973" (PDF). Hungarian Studies Review, Vol. XL, No. 2. Fall 2013. p. 125.
- ^ Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert (2014), His Humble Servant: Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert's Memoirs of Her Years of Service to Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, St. Augustine's Press. p. 150.
- ^ "Hungary's 'forgotten' war victims". BBC News. 7 November 2009.
- ^ "The Cardinal Who Lived in the Embassy | Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training". adst.org. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
- ^ Chip Berlet, "Cardinal Mindszenty: Heroic Anti-Communist or Anti-Semite or Both?" The St. Louis Journalism Review, Vol. 16, No. 105, April 1988.
- ^ a b Mindszenty, József Cardinal (1974) Memoirs. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
- ^ Mindszenty, József Cardinal. Memoirs. p. 34, 1974. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
- ^ George Seldes (1987), Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs, Ballantine Books, New York. pp. 414–16.
- ISBN 0-312-32572-X
- ^ Seldes (1987), pp. 417–23.
- ^ Seldes (1987), p. 418.
- ^ The Trial of Jozsef Mindszenty (court transcript). The Hungarian State Publishing House.
- ^ a b c Lehnert (2014), p. 150.
- ^ "Ad Ecx.mos PP.DD. Archiepiscopos et Episcopos Ungariae, die II m. Ianuarii, A.D. MCMXLIX - Pius PP. XII, Epistula | PIUS XII". w2.vatican.va. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
- ^ "Cardinal Mindszenty Quits Hungary for Rome", UPI report in San Mateo (CA) Times, 28 September 1971, p. 1
- ^ Mindszenty, József (1974). Memoirs. p. 237.
- ^ "Members are family as church honors 110th anniversary". MY CENTRAL JERSEY. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
- ^ "Woodside Priory | A Day & Boarding School in Portola Valley, CA". www.prioryca.org. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
- ^ St. Raymond church Bulletin. 16 September 2012
- ^ "The process of canonization of the Servant of God Cardinal József Mindszenty". www.mindszentyalapitvany.hu. Archived from the original on 26 January 2019. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
- ^ "Beatification of Cardinal József Mindszenty on track". 6 May 2017. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
- ^ Gomes, Robin (13 February 2019). "Card. Newman and Indian Sr. Mariam Thresia cleared for sainthood". vaticannews.va. Retrieved 12 August 2019.
- ISBN 978-0748625246
Further reading
- Lehnert, Pascalina; Susan Johnson (transl.). His Humble Servant: Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert's Memoirs of Her Years of Service to Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Saint Augustine's Press, South Bend. February 2014. ISBN 978-1-58731-367-7.
- "His Eminence files": American Embassy, Budapest: from Embassy archives, 15 (1971). ed by Ádám Somorjai, OSB, Budapest, METEM, 2008. ISBN 9789639662254
- Do Not Forget This Small Honest Nation: Cardinal Mindszenty to 4 US Presidents and State Secretaries 1956-1971 as Conserved in American Archives and Commented by American Diplomats. Ed. by Ádám Somorjai OSB and Tibor Zinner. XLIBRIS, 2013. ISBN 9781479768592
- Paksy Zoltán: Mindszenty József nézetei és politikai tevékenysége. Korunk, 2014. 4. szám (accessible online at www.multunk.hu).
- Somorjai, A.; Zinner, T.: Correspondence of Cardinal József Mindszenty with the Holy See from the American Legation, 1956–71. – EOS Verlag, Sank Ottilien, 2017. ISBN 9783830678380.
External links
- The Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation
- Newspaper clippings about József Mindszenty in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
- The lead door – a documentary about Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty's life while in exile in the USA Embassy in Budapest