VATICAN II AND HUNGARY 51conservative minority, the Council was just another symptom
of the social disease afflicting the Western world—just another
step toward decadence and further disorientation.3
If we look at the European countries dominated by the Soviet
Union, and Hungary in particular, historians tell the story in a
completely different way.4 There, the Second Vatican Council ap-
peared to have been a rather insignificant event because it did
not seem to have had a strong impact on either church or society.
Most of all, it did not seem to have changed considerably the diffi-
cult situation in which churches and religious communities found
themselves under the dictatorship of successive incarnations of
the Communist Party.5
With the end of the Second World War, before the establish-
ment of the Communist system in Hungary, the Catholic Church
remained a very powerful social institution. It was the country’s
largest landowner, overseeing thousands of schools, controlling
dozens of publishing houses and newspapers, and enjoying the
- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in 2006 distinguished between two “herme-
neutics” of the Second Vatican Council: one of “discontinuity” and one of “reform.”
While the first would highlight the differences between a preconciliar and a postc-
onciliar Church, the second would emphasize the continuity of the one Church; Mi-
chael J. Lacey and Francis Oakley, eds., The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 357–38. In fact, Ratzinger developed this
reformist interpretation much earlier as a middle-ground alternative to progressive
and traditionalist understandings of the Council; Komonchak, “Modernity and the
Construction of Roman Catholicism,” Cristianesimo nella Storia, no. 18 (1997): 353. - A typical example: “To be sure, when all this happened the communist bloc
was never included. Of course the Universal Church was concerned with what hap-
pened in the communist countries, as demonstrated by the visits to these countries
by Franz Cardinal König, as well as by the Vatican’s Ostpolitik. But inside these
countries there was no possibility of taking part in the changes in ecclesiology and
society”; Blum, “Catholic Church in Hungary,” 315. - Patrick Michel, Politics and Religion in Eastern Europe: Catholicism in Hungary,
Poland and Czechoslovakia, trans. Alan Braley (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991). From 1944
to 1948, this was the Hungarian Communist Party, merged in 1948 with the Social
Democratic Party to become the Hungarian Working People’s Party. This last organi-
zation was, in turn, replaced in 1956 with the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party fol-
lowing Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of October–November 1956.