72 ÁRPÁD VON KLIMÓ
The most difficult question concerns the impact that the Coun-
cil had on believers, since we have very few studies of religious life
in Hungary since the 1960s. There were two movements perse-
cuted by the Communist state that attracted a considerable num-
ber of mostly younger Catholics and managed to survive in small
groups throughout the Kádár era (1956–89). One of these two
movements was Regnum Marianum; the other one was founded
by the Piarist father György Bulányi.62 Bulányi claimed that he was
strongly inspired by the documents of Vatican II. In a letter writ-
ten to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on Good Friday 1986, Bulányi
recalled, “I read and translated the documents for my friends in a
great, fever-like hurry. My heart was filled with joy when I read in
Lumen gentium the following lines: ‘Just as Christ carried out the
work of redemption in poverty and persecution, so the Church is
called to follow the same route so that it might communicate the
fruits of salvation to men.’ ” 63
In particular, it was the mention of poverty and persecution
in Lumen gentium that excited Bulányi, who had begun to found
a movement of small, secret communities of Catholic believers in
the late 1940s. He then continued this illegal work for decades, de-
spite the fact that he was imprisoned several times in the interim.
The network of small communities that Father Bulányi found-
ed under the name of Bokor (Hungarian for “bush”) was the most
successful illegal religious movement during the Communist peri-
od.64 After the prohibition and persecution of countless Christian
decree Inter mirifica, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/
documents/vat-ii_decree_19631204_inter-mirifica_en.html; accessed January 2, 2014.
- Máté-Tóth, Bulányi und die Bokor Bewegung: Eine pastoraltheologische Würdi-
gung (Vienna: Ungarisches Kirchensoziologisches Institut, 1996). On Regnum Mari-
anum, see von Klimó, “Katholische Jugendgruppen,” 121–37. For a memoir of one of
the priests active in the movement, see János Dobszay, Így vagy sehogy: Fejezetek a
Regnum Marianum életéből (Budapest: Regnum Marianum, 1991). - Quoted at Máté-Tóth, Bulányi und die Bokor Bewegung, 14.
- József Illyés Szabolcs, New Catholic Movements in Hungary: Praxis of a
Movement-Theory (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 2008).