74 ÁRPÁD VON KLIMÓ
the center of these groups was the communal teaching and learn-
ing of theological and practical Christian wisdom based on their
own Bible study and on writings by Father Bulányi.
For many Hungarians in the wake of Vatican II, an alternative
lifestyle that was radically informed by religious faith allowed an
escape from both the tristesse of the dictatorship and the tutelage
of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The communal learning formed a
voluntaristic counter-pedagogy to the ubiquitous impositions of
Communist ideology and indoctrination. On the one hand, the
members found security and certain protections against a system
that was perceived as threatening and repressive. At the same
time, the egalitarian, open, and critical forms of activity that they
had undertaken were akin to the anti-authoritarian values that
the West was discovering in the 1960s, a period that spawned
similar pacifistic, egalitarian, anti-capitalist, and cultural-critical
movements and cells.68 When one looks at the flourishing of new
movements like Bokor, it becomes clear that the Second Vatican
Council had a positive, as well as a negative, influence on Hungar-
ian Catholicism.
The Case of the Bokor-Movement (Ph.D. diss., Central European University, 2014),
41–55.
- Von Klimó, “Zwischen Beat und Kommunismus: Katholische Jugendgrup-
pen in Ungarn 1968,” in Die letzte Chance? 1968 in Osteuropa: Analysen und Berichte
über ein Schlüsseljahr, ed. Angelika Ebbinghaus (Hamburg: VSA, 2008), 108–20;
see also Péter Apor, “Autentikus közösség és autonóm személyiség: 1989 egyik
előtörténete,” AETAS-Történettudományi folyóirat, no. 4 (2013): 22–39; and Kinga
Povedák, “Catholicism in Transition: The ‘Religious Beat’ Movement in Hungary,” in
Christianity in the Modern World: Changes and Controversies, ed. Giselle Vincett and
Elijah Obinna (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014), 139–56. For a broader study of the
1960s, see DeGroot, Sixties Unplugged.