58 ÁRPÁD VON KLIMÓ
him personally in Venice, but the Hungarian bishops were not al-
lowed to leave the country for this purpose.
The year 1959 came only three years after the invasion of
Hungary by Soviet troops, who had brutally crushed the coun-
try’s uprising against Stalinism. The Catholic Church in Hungary,
deprived of leadership, was deeply divided.19
The national head of the Church, primate József Cardinal
Mindszenty of Esztergom, had, during those dramatic days in
November 1956, escaped by seeking asylum at the legation of the
United States in Budapest, where he would spend the next fif-
teen years. Thereafter, Mindszenty was unable to communicate
with other bishops or representatives of the Hungarian Church.
Second in line was Archbishop József Grősz of Kalocsa, who had
signed an agreement between the Hungarian Church and the
Communist state in 1950, against the advice of Pope Pius XII and
against the will of Mindszenty. Grősz had nevertheless been ap-
prehended and kept under house arrest until 1956. Two other
bishops, Bertalan Badalik of Veszprém and József Pétery of Vác,
were also in confinement in the late 1950s.
At the same time, the Vatican excommunicated a number of
Hungarian priests who had actively participated in the state-
sponsored “Priest Movement for Peace.”20 In 1959, the Vatican
nominated four Hungarian priests as bishops, but the state did
not acknowledge them until much later. In 1961, the state im-
prisoned more priests and lay Catholics who did not comply with
restrictions on the Church after they had set up youth groups
in which they practiced the faith.21 The conflicts between state
- The situation is treated in detail in Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköz-
társaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 33–38. - John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 371. - Von Klimó, “Katholische Jugendgruppen in Ungarn in der zweiten Hälfte
der sechziger Jahre: Die Gruppen um Regnum Marianum—ein religiöses Netz-
werk?,” in Vernetzte Improvisationen: Gesellschaftliche Subsysteme in Ostmitteleuropa
und in der DDR, ed. Annette Schuhmann (Cologne: Böhlau 2008), 121–37.