68 ÁRPÁD VON KLIMÓ
who was the leader of the “Movement of Priests for Peace,” an
organization created by the Communist secret police, “spoke in
the name of the Hungarian bishops.” What he proposed was the
establishment of “a central body for coordinating action taken by
the world-wide church on behalf of peace.”50
Both of the bishops’ statements were in accordance with
Communist propaganda, but they also corresponded to the spir-
it of the times in the West. For the last sessions of the Second
Vatican Council, the State Office of Church Affairs instructed its
agents in the Hungarian delegation to focus on improving and
deepening their relations with the Vatican and with representa-
tives of churches in Western countries.
To sum up the research that has been done so far, based most-
ly on archival materials from the state security services in Hun-
gary, the following picture emerges: the participation of Hungar-
ian clergy in the international event was strongly observed and
orchestrated by the State Office of Church Affairs and the secret
police. However—and this is a crucial problem—we have almost
no documents from other sources, and we do not have access to
all Hungarian Church archives or to Vatican archives for these
years. The image that remains for historians of the Hungarian
delegation and its activity during Vatican II therefore reflects the
security apparatus’s very particular worldview.51
The Communist state representatives responsible for control
of the Catholic Church regarded their activities during the Coun-
cil as a successful operation against “clerical reaction.” They were
content that no anti-Communist statements had been published
and that they had gathered information about the Vatican and
- Gilles Routhier, “Finishing the Work Begun,” in History of Vatican II, ed. Al-
berigo and Komonchak, 5:175. - A good introduction to the difficulties of interpreting the files of the Com-
munist state security apparatus is in Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal His-
tory (New York: Random House, 1997).