VATICAN II AND HUNGARY 67The Third Session started on September 14, 1964, the same
day that the Vatican and the Hungarian People’s Republic signed
the Partial Agreement. The parties had achieved a compromise
of sorts: the Vatican accepted the nomination of new bishops fa-
vored by the Communist government, and the Hungarian regime
agreed to the installation of a few bishops and priests it had pre-
viously blocked. The four new bishops and two of the formerly
banned bishops took part in the new fourteen-member Hungar-
ian delegation.
In 1974, an internal Radio Free Europe report assessed that
the Hungarian government was much more content with the 1964
agreement than the Vatican because the Church in Hungary was
still under state control, while the Communist state had only of-
fered a few concessions.48 The Hungarian Church historian Máté
Gárdonyi interprets Vatican Ostpolitik and the 1964 Partial Agree-
ment as a strategy that was solely concerned with the survival of
the Church, entailing acceptance of the bitter pill of bishops and
priests who collaborated with the Communist state.49
The 1964 session of the Council brought discussions of Sche-
ma XIII, a document that dealt with the relationship between
the Church and the modern world. The Hungarian delegation—
partly influenced by the state security services—worked out a
statement acknowledging that there were still problems for the
Church in Communist countries, but that believers profited from
the social progress that the Communist regime had introduced
and that this progress should also be brought to other parts of
the world.
During the last session in the fall of 1965, Bishop Brezanóczy,
- “1956 Digital Archive,” OSA Archive, http://osaarchivum.org/files/hold-
ings/300/8/3/text_da/35–5-224.shtml. - Máté Gárdonyi, “Túlélés—együttműködés—ellenállás: A katolikus egyház
stratégiai a ‘népi demokráciákban,’ ” in Csapdában: Tanulmányok a katolikus egyház
történetéből 1945–1989, ed. Gábor Bankuti (Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok
Történeti Levéltára, 2010), 31–42.