Last week, the Cause of Cardinal József Mindszenty of Hungary (1892-1975) took a major step forward: Pope Francis declared Mindszenty Venerable. This Cold War leader – who was arrested, tortured and forced into seclusion by the Hungarian communist regime – demonstrated heroic courage in perilous times for the Church.
But Mindszenty is not the only Cold War Hungarian bishop whose Cause is before the Vatican. Like Mindszenty, the bishop of the Hungarian-speaking Transylvania diocese of Romania, Áron Márton (1896-1980), was also arrested and tortured by the communists. On release, Mindszenty isolated himself in Budapest’s American embassy. Márton, in contrast, returned to work in his diocesan office and cathedral. In 1992, the Vatican designated Márton a Servant of God, and supporters of his canonisation Cause believe he represents another, equally heroic path for Church leaders in a secular age.
How could a Hungarian Catholic have led a diocese in the middle of Romania? Transylvania was actually part of Hungary until 1918. Although the borders changed after World War I, they never did in the minds of the million-strong Hungarian minority who still live in Transylvania today.
Márton was born in 1896, more than 20 years before the borders changed, into a devout Catholic family in one of Transylvania’s all-Hungarian villages. In Romanian, it’s called Sân Dominic, but locals know it by the Hungarian name, Szentdomokos. This rural childhood is another point of comparison with Mindszenty: Mindszenty’s birth village of Csehmindszent in Hungary has just 360 inhabitants and, like Sân Dominic, one Catholic church. (Born with the German surname Pehm, he changed it aged nearly 50 to a name adapted from his birthplace.)
When Márton was young, his parish was a constant presence. To see the church’s entrance, all he had to do was turn his head to the left when he walked out his front door. I know this because I’ve seen this view myself. I am trained as an anthropologist and I lived just down the road in Márton’s village for a year and a half while doing research. I have stepped into the line of parishioners processing down the road to Márton’s memorial birthday Mass. And standing at Márton’s front door, I have looked at his humble portrait, which shows him holding his bishop’s crozier, cast in black wrought iron and placed high on the church’s exterior wall.
But Márton and Mindszenty are linked by more than a rural upbringing and nationality. The way Transylvanian Hungarian Catholics tell it, Bishop Márton might have sat in Mindszenty’s chair. Plenty of times during my field research, I heard the rumour that, when Mindszenty’s predecessor died in 1945, Pope Pius XII wanted Márton for this cathedral seat. It is hard to know if this is true, and if so why Márton never ended up a cardinal. But to hear Transylvanian Hungarians’ version of history, Márton himself refused out of loyalty to the faithful in his diocese: he was too dedicated to his Transylvanian flock to leave his post.
Like Mindszenty, Márton was arrested in the summer of 1949, the early days of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Decades before, the Soviet Union had devised a ruthless playbook for what to do with religious groups. First, the bishop was detained along with a number of priests and members of Transylvania’s Franciscan order. Two years later, the communist government used a show trial to sentence Márton to life in prison.
Leaders of other churches suffered alongside Márton in communist jails. The post-war government did not single out the Catholic Church but rather followed a step-by-step recipe for consolidating its power. Still, Márton languished. He spent the next four years in some of the most gruelling prisons in Romania where he was brutalised with extreme cold, heat, and starvation. Denisa Bodeanu, a Romanian historian working on his canonisation, found an interview in which Márton recalled: “I spent years dreaming of bread, only to find that when I woke, there was no bread.”
Márton and Mindszenty both left jail in the mid-1950s, but then their stories diverge. Ultimately, they made very different choices under contrasting circumstances.
Mindszenty’s release was a high point of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the communist regime, and he gave a memorable radio address endorsing the revolt. When the Soviet Union crushed the revolutionaries with tanks on the streets of Budapest, Mindszenty fled to the American embassy, where he spent the next 15 years in internal exile. He became a distant figure who wrote letters to exert his moral authority but had little administrative power. In contrast, in the mid-1950s, Márton returned to the cathedral seat at Alba Iulia, where he immediately set about restoring order to his diocese.
Mindszenty’s and Márton’s actions show their fundamentally different understandings of the communist regime. From his earliest days in office, Mindszenty was convinced that communism was evil and, what is more, aggressively antagonistic to the Church. There could be no dialogue with evil and it was no good trying to hold it accountable. So when some priests took positions in the communist government, he urged the pope to excommunicate them. Excommunication was Mindszenty’s preferred tactic because he was willing to make a martyr of the Hungarian Church, sacrificing its members to defend it against evil.
Márton had no desire for a martyr Church. But neither was he willing to compromise and collaborate. Instead, he strove for a third option. From the cathedral in Alba Iulia, he dedicated his post-prison efforts to building a sovereign Church that functioned independently of worldly powers. And rather than purify the Church through excommunication, he sought out partners among both priests and lay people, among anyone committed to this goal.
Still, Márton was willing to demand that the faithful be pure. During his research on Transylvania during the 1950s, the historian Stefano Bottoni found a record of a homily Márton gave in a village with strong ties to the regime. Bottoni quotes Márton saying: “Catholics must be pure, and it is better for all those incapable of this to leave the Church right now.” Here is where Márton and Mindszenty parted ways. Márton made purity a matter of moral conscience. Leaving the Church should ultimately be the believers’ decision; he just didn’t see it as one of his administrative tools.
Márton was always willing to speak to government officials; and he did not hold back from making strong demands when needed. Bottoni writes that during a meeting in 1958 Márton took the offensive against one man: “[Márton] confronted him with numerous cases when the government had not respected the rights established in the law and constitution.” Mindszenty’s great virtue was courage, and he was determined to withstand the forces that he considered to be evil on earth. But when historians celebrate Márton, they also celebrate the vision of a sovereign Church led by exemplars of civility.
Mindszenty and Márton’s Causes are advancing at a time when many European and North American Catholics are debating “the Benedict Option”. This is a movement of Christians who consider the secular world to be in ruins. Inspired by St Benedict, the 5th-century founder of the Benedictine order, they urge the faithful to isolate themselves with a select few in small local communities, outposts of purity in a corrupted secular society. The Benedict Option imagines a grassroots movement, but what happens when the Church’s leaders choose isolation? Mindszenty did just that, while his colleague across the border, Márton, forged a different path. Their choices were rooted in different views about the Church’s relationship with secularism.
Many Catholics, not just Hungarians, would do well to consider the consequences their leadership had for the Church in their respective situations.
Marc Roscoe Loustau is the co-editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts
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