VATICAN II AND HUNGARY 53tions by Hungarian bishops.7 In other words, the history of the
Council, it seems, would not have to be substantially rewritten if
the Hungarians had not participated at all.
If the impact that the Hungarian delegation had on the Sec-
ond Vatican Council was so negligible, why should we even con-
sider finding out more about it? Surprisingly, despite the weak-
ness of the Hungarian delegation in Rome, the Council, on the
other hand, did indeed have a strong effect on Catholics in Hun-
gary, an effect that has not been studied until recently. This chap-
ter will delineate what we so far know about the history of Hun-
garian Catholicism during and after the Second Vatican Council,
with an overview of the most recent research on the topic.8 The
history of how Vatican II affected the Catholic Church in Hun-
gary will be studied in three different fields: first, within the
context of Vatican Ostpolitik; second, with regard to theological
and administrative changes beginning in the 1960s; and finally,
through some of the activities of independent Catholic religious
movements inspired by the Council.
Vatican Ostpolitik: Better or Worse for
the Church in Hungary?
The Second Vatican Council was part of the larger story of a
church strongly involved in the Cold War in the context of what
has been designated “Vatican Ostpolitik.” 9 Ostpolitik was a term
- Alberigo and Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II.
- The two most important contributions so far are the dissertation by a historian
and researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, András Fejérdy, Magyarország
és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat 1959–1965 (Ph.D. diss., Magyar Tudományos Akadémia: Törté-
nettudományi Intézet (Hungarian Academy of Sciences: Institute of History, 2011),
and the broader approach examining the complex power struggle between the Catho-
lic Church and the Communist state in the monumental dissertation by Nicolas Bau-
quet, Pouvoir, église et société en Hongrie communiste, 1944–1964: Histoire intérieure d’une
domination (Ph.D. diss., Institut d’études politiques de Paris, 2013). - One early use of the term was in Dennis Dunn, “The Kremlin and the Vati-