VATICAN II AND HUNGARY 59and church in these years revolved around the question of which
priests should decide in matters of Church administration: those
loyal to the Communist state or those loyal to the Vatican.
The Church and its administration were ever more deeply
infiltrated by hundreds of state security agents and informants.
András Máté-Tóth counted that, in 1958, 171 out of 4,663 priests
active in Hungary, or 3.7 percent, collaborated with the secret po-
lice and the State Office of Church Affairs, while about three- to
four hundred priests worked illegally.22 According to Stefano Bot-
toni, the Communist state in time successfully managed to create
a loyal clergy by arresting and intimidating priests suspected of
anti-communism and promoting the careers of those willing to
collaborate. He assumes that, from the late 1970s onward, the ma-
jority of priests in Hungary were loyal to the regime or even col-
laborated with the state security apparatus.23 Most secret police
informants, however, were laymen working in the different levels
of Church administration—in parishes and diocesan offices, in
the few remaining Catholic publishing houses and newspapers,
and in seminaries.
The Communist apparatchiks responsible for confessional af-
fairs wanted to make sure that the Church was under total ob-
servation. The secretariat of the Communist Party proclaimed in
1951 that, with the establishment of the State Office of Church
Affairs, “we have created a State organ that is capable of officially
observing the activities of the clergy and at the same time of di-
recting its policies.”24
- Máté-Tóth, “A II. Vatikani Zsinat és a magyar elhárítás”; Krisztián Ungváry,
“The Kádár Regime and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy,” Hungarian Quarterly, no. 187
(2007): 80–91. “Collaboration” refers to the fact that they wrote reports for the State
Security Agency. - Stefano Bottoni, “A Special Relationship: Hungarian Intelligence and the
Vatican (1961–1978),” in NKVD/KGB Activities and Its Cooperation with Other Secret
Services in Central and Eastern Europe 1945–1989: Anthology of the International and
Interdisciplinary Conference (Bratislava: Szerk. AAVV, 2008), 153. - Quoted at Bauquet, Pouvoir, église et société, 344.