Cardinal Mindszenty: Confessor and Martyr of Our Time

The Angelus - January 1980



IT IS HARD to think of any period in the history of the Church in which its confessors and martyrs have been so obstinately and systematically neglected and passed over in silence as have those of our own time.

Such an attitude is utterly foreign to the spirit of the Church. One has only to remember how dramatically the Gospel narrates the beheading of St. John the Baptist, the care with which St. Paul's letters describe his many sufferings and how the Acts tell of the ill-treatment suffered by the Apostles and the martyrdom of St. Stephen. One thinks too of the painstaking care with which the martyrologies related and disseminated the details of the trials and judgments of those persecuted. The early Christians were filled with reverence for their brothers who had suffered persecution for Christ's sake. The martyrs were the first to be venerated as saints. The Holy Eucharist was celebrated over their tombs in order to underline the spiritual union between living Christians and the martyrs.

Little trace of this unity is to be seen nowadays. Although for 60 years the Church has been suffering a persecution wider in scope, more refined in its methods, crueller, more dangerous and more intensive than any other persecution of the past, many Christians consider it a sign of intolerance to condemn it. In our age of one-sided pacifism, in which the decadent West would rather live in peace with pagans and murderers than with God Himself, the tears and blood of the persecuted are an embarrassment and a hindrance to the deals of businessmen and the negotiations of diplomats. Therefore religious persecution is never spoken of. Therefore we are not allowed to have the torments of today's martyrs constantly before our eyes. Therefore the desperate appeals of the oppressed are thrown into the waste baskets of the United Nations and the World Council of Churches. Therefore, even in the great family of the Catholic Church, we have to witness the heartless scandal whereby the best and most afflicted of God's children are denied and forgotten, or—as Hansjakob Stehle puts it in his book on the Vatican's Ostpolitik—are considered idiots by their own brothers and sisters.

PROBABLY NONE of our contemporaries has suffered more deeply and more intimately from this scandal than Cardinal Mindszenty. That is why we trust and believe that this precious grain of Hungarian wheat that fell into the earth in Mary's garden on the 15th May 1975 will not remain alone, but will bring forth plentiful fruit. For "the soul of this just man is in God's hands; God has tested him and found him worthy to be with Him."

God indeed put him to the test. His was a Way of the Cross such as hardly any other cardinal has ever had to follow. He trod it with exemplary fidelity, without any hatred for his persecutors, and he did not turn aside from it although compromise or flight would have made life easier for him. He followed faithfully in the Lord's footsteps. For where Christ was before him, there His servant should be too.

He suffered terribly. None of those who heard his voice during the radio broadcast of his trial on the 5th February 1949 will ever forget the tone of voice with which he kept repeating: "Ingenis, ingenis—Yes, yes, that is so." It was not the voice of the real Mindszenty, but the stammering of a caricature of the man, reduced by pitiless tortures to the condition of an unresisting heap of misery. "In the eyes of fools he seemed to be dead."

His sufferings were no less when, for the sake of peaceful co-existence, his shining figure was so systematically blackened by lies and calumny, so that Christ's reproach "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those that are sent to you," might be applied to the Church of today. "Thus he lost his life in this world, but he will gain it in eternity."

He suffered even more under the cross, by his own admission the heaviest of his whole life, of being forced to leave his beloved motherland. "God has tested him, and found him worthy to be with Him."

Later, he suffered from the countless letters he received from Hungary, such as the one in which he read:

Reading such lines, the Cardinal must have had a powerful realization that Christ's words: "He who loves his life will lose it" had been proved true thousands of times in Hungary. In this context, his suffering was unutterable when the Holy Father took the decision to remove him from office as Archbishop and Primate. "As gold in the furnace God has tested him, and has accepted him as a perfect burnt-offering."

Cardinal Mindszenty did not yield to the temptation to justify himself publicly, but accepted his cross even when it came from a direction he had least expected. In the light of the Faith this can be seen as the crown of his heroic life.

His bitter fate reminds us that all our efforts to save the threatened Church will remain fruitless without the stream of graces earned by the secret prayers and the silent calvaries of saints whose names we may never know. It is from these that the Church draws its vital strength. In the light of this, what happened to the cardinal will one day be seen as a victory for the Holy Cross. This is God's reason for allowing it to happen.

JESUS CHRIST and all the martyrs who shared His fate have gone before Cardinal Mindszenty on the hard road he chose of his own free will. This road is that of the saints of all times. They were stripped of their rights just as was the Son of God Himself, who took on the figure of a slave and was obedient unto death on the Cross. This cross of obedience is the fundamental law of Christianity. In all our necessary and praiseworthy attempts to gain greater respect for human rights, within the Church itself as well as outside it, we must not fall prey to illusions, and we must never forget that our first duty is to be the defenseless disciples of Him Who died stripped of all His rights, and Who wants to continue not only His life but His death too in each one of us. That a great figure of the stature of Cardinal Mindszenty in the history of the Church should have submitted himself to this law is a mark of great sanctity. It is an example to all Christians who suffer under the often heavy and at times imcomprehensible cross of ecclesiastical obedience.

While we wait expectantly for the miracles that we hope God will soon perform through His confessor for the salvation of His Church, we can already dare to say, "Corona aurea super caput ejus!" For "Blessed are those who suffer in the cause of right, the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you, and speak all manner of evil against you falsely, because of Me. Be glad and light-hearted, for a rich reward awaits you in heaven" (Matt. 5: 10-12).

I hope that this book will achieve a wide circulation, and that it will awaken us to a greater reverence for our persecuted brothers, true and living vessels of the Holy Spirit. May it constantly remind us of the great cardinal, who will go down in history as a martyr of the Church of Silence and a confessor of a Church now engaged in tearing itself to pieces. Those who were able to meet him in person were strongly affected by the nobility, humility and ardour of this man who bore the Church within himself and suffered its agony in his own person. Nothing false nor cowardly could withstand the blaze of his eyes, and yet they radiated gentleness and love. Woe to us if we forget him.

—Werenfried van Straaten, O. Praem.
The preceding article is the foreword, written by Fr. van Straaten, for the book Cardinal Mindszenty, Confessor and Martyr of Our Time.