Bishop András Veres, secretary of the Hungarian Catholic Bishop’s Conference considered important to recount the following:

“In the era of communist dictatorship monks and priests were regularly insulted, besides other members of the society. Clericals were persecuted with especially harsh methods, regarding the fact that the atheism considered church as its greatest ideological enemy. Daily or weekly interrogations of priests or even physical force against them were not rare. Intimidation was one of the main methods of the system’s maintainers. There were numerous people however, who were able to endure heroically the cruellest torture and all kinds of tribulation. Others tried to avoid confrontation and did their work quietly, unostentatiously. And there were some who, under the mental and physical terror, failed and became involved, gave reports on their service and on those living near them.

I heard from older priests that in clerical circles it was mostly known “who was a spy”. At church gatherings these persons generally warned their colleagues: “if I am here don’t touch this or that topic because I have to report on them”. Their number could not have been very high even if we keep in mind that there were a lot more priests and regulars then than today.

In the article of Adriányi however, I have made an interesting observation: “he escaped from Hungary due to the insults of the authorities” more than 40 years ago. Well, he did escape. I don’t have an idea how church could have stayed alive if everybody had run away… I do not think that a person who escaped has the right to call anybody to account, even if they did not prove to be heroes or martyrs.

As for asking for pardon: I know of cases when the concerned priest apologised to his fellow priests. I am not convinced they should do it in public. The ones to apologise are rather the maintainers of that regime, humiliated these people and kept them under mental and physical terror. Some of them might well be in power, in today’s political scene.

If in the proposal it is included that some names could stay in the shadow, why should then a list of ill-fated people, the real victims, be published while those who controlled them could remain unknown? In my opinion the whole case is now unexplorable – we all know that in the year of change tons of documents and files were destroyed. Whose files could those have been? Most probably they were not those of humiliated and unfortunate people but those of the leaders.”

To the question whether there is a former denouncer among bishops today, András Veres replied he did not have any information on that and so he cannot form an opinion.

MK

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