VATICAN II AND HUNGARY 63The Communist leadership distrusted this new, global ap-
proach, which seemed so different from Pius XII’s strong anti-
communism because it made it more difficult to defame the Catho-
lic clergy as reactionary.38 Only beginning in 1962 did Hungarian
state officials, as well as some of their comrades in Poland and
the Soviet Union, come to regard the Council as an opportunity
to infiltrate the Vatican and to spread Communist propaganda
within the Catholic world. Nicolas Bauquet interprets this as a
major shift within Hungarian Communist functionaries’ percep-
tion of the outside world—specifically, the capitalist West. In
other words, they started to understand the territories and soci-
eties of Western Europe—Italy in particular—not only as threat-
ening, but also as full of opportunities to gather information and
to support Communist parties based there.
A number of agents of the secret police began to learn for-
eign languages, receiving training for new, international careers
as spies. Some of these were specialists who had worked with the
State Office of Church Affairs.39 The comrades leading the strug-
gle against the Church formulated a number of goals for a few
Hungarian bishops and a number of other informants and spies
to achieve.40 Among those goals were: (a) gathering information;
(b) improving the image of the Communist countries and estab-
lishing “useful contacts” in the West; (c) “repelling the conserva-
person who falls into error—even in the case of men who err regarding the truth or
are led astray as a result of their inadequate knowledge, in matters either of religion
or of the highest ethical standards. A man who has fallen into error does not cease
to be a man. He never forfeits his personal dignity; and that is something that must
always be taken into account”; John XXIII, Pacem in terris, no. 158.
- At the same time, we should not forget that Pius XII had started to distance
himself from the capitalist West, particularly after Stalin’s death in 1953, calling for
a “coexistence in truth” to replace the existing “climate of fear”; quoted in Frank J.
Coppa, The Life and Pontificate of Pope Pius XII (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Uni-
versity of America Press, 2013), 218. - Bauquet, Pouvoir, église et société, 618.
- A detailed account of these goals is in Fejerdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni
Zsinat, 137–68.