Cardinal Mindszenty Remembered 50 Years After US Visit (2024/10/26)

Fifty years after he last visited the United States, Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, Roman Catholic primate of Hungary and prisoner of conscience against both Naziism and communism, was vividly recalled last week at an event at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Mindszenty, who died at age 83 in 1975, is now on the path to becoming a saint in his church. In 2019, the Vatican proclaimed him "venerable"— historically the first step in a process that leads to "beatification" (proclaiming a deceased person in a state of bliss) and finally "canonization" (making one a saint and thus someone to whom Catholics can pray).

Vatican sources say that with Pope Francis weighing in on behalf of sainthood for Mindszenty, it could come as early as 2026.

"It is vitally important to reflect on his message," Hungarian Ambassador Szabolcs Takács told a crowd of Americans and Hungarians gathered at the embassy to commemorate Mindszenty, noting that in facing brutal torture and prolonged imprisonment to stand against totalitarianism, the prelate "became of symbol of human dignity to the entire world."

As a young priest in 1919, Mindszenty was arrested for denouncing the Hungarian government of Communist Bela Kun. Named a bishop of the Church in 1944, Mindszenty was again imprisoned for denouncing Nazi occupiers and speaking out in favor of the Jews — an estimated 10-15,000 who the government executed in the months before Hungary was liberated in June 1945.

In later years, Mindszenty was known to give Holy Communion — the highest sacrament of the Catholic Mass in which a communicant eats a wafer symbolizing Christ's death — to Jewish visitors to Masses he celebrated. He did so, Hungarian National Assembly Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Zsolt Nemeth told Newsmax, "because of his passion for the Jews who suffered so much."

When Pope Pius XII gave Mindszenty the red hat of a cardinal, the most senior official of the Church, in 1946, he said, "You will be the first to suffer the martyrdom whose symbol this red color is." He was right.

For denouncing the Communists who occupied his country, Mindszenty was arrested shortly after Christmas of 1948. Brutally interrogated, tortured to the limit of human endurance, and drugged during a show trial in 1951, the prelate remained in prison until 1956.

That uprising ousted the Communist government and proclaimed Hungary a neutral nation in the Cold War. The rebels broke Mindszenty out of prison, but in a matter of days, Russian tanks subdued the uprising, and the cardinal took refuge in the U.S. Embassy for the next 15 years.

As a symbol of unyielding resistance to communism, Mindszenty moved many throughout the world. Dr. Elizabeth Spalding of the Victims of Communism Memorial recalled how "my dad [educator and scholar Lee Edwards] was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the plight of Cardinal Mindszenty made him angry. He vowed to do whatever he could to free people from communism."

In 1971, Pope Paul VI ordered Mindszenty to leave the embassy in Budapest and come to the Vatican. Under an agreement with the Soviet Union, the cardinal was stripped of his title as primate of Esztergom (leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary) in 1973. Pope Paul also annulled the excommunications of Hungarian Communist officials by Pope Pius for the imprisonment and torture of Mindszenty.

An angry Mindszenty subsequently published his memoirs, in which he reiterated his opposition to communism and was also highly critical of the liberal reforms within the Church begun under the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Noting that Mindszenty died before the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, Father Stefan Megyery, pastor of the Epiphany Catholic Church in Washington, D.C., and historian of the area Hungarian Catholic Community, noted that part of his legacy "was that others carried on for him fighting communism— [Polish labor leader] Lech Walesa, [Russian author] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, [Polish] Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, and Pope John Paul II."

Had Mindszenty lived ten or fifteen years later, added Father Megyery, "he might have been Pope John Paul II."
That did not happen, but Cardinal Mindszenty may soon be sharing an honor from his Church with John Paul II—that of sainthood and the object of prayers everywhere.

The following are Fr. Julius’ comments:
Cardinal József Mindszenty visited us at the abbey in June 1974 during his second trip to America (after he left the American embassy in Budapest in 1971 and moved to Vienna [at the Pope's request]). Because in 1956, after the suppression of the Revolution, he fled to the American embassy in Budapest and lived there for 15 years in the capital, the communists were powerless.

On his trip to America, he lived in our abbey in Texas and stayed with us for five days. The main events of his busy program were the press conference (Tibor Mészáros, secretary and priest, was the interpreter); received an honorary doctorate from the University of Dallas; Confirmation of Hungarian children at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth; and a large Mass for about 700 people in the gymnasium of the Cistercian school. At his request were the monthly Hungarian services started at the abbey.

I think he died in 1975. He was returning to Austria from a trip to South America when he fell ill on the plane and died a few days later. He was first buried in Mariazell, Austria, and after the end of communism, his body was taken back to Hungary and given his final, ornate resting place in the crypt of the Cathedral in Esztergom.