HUNGARY: Nothing Was Left

One week after the Hungarian Communist government had announced the signing of a church-state agreement, a government decree directed all but four Roman Catholic religious orders to suspend their activities. Ten thousand nuns and monks in 59 orders were given three months to get out of their monasteries and return to secular life. The four exceptions: Benedictines, Franciscans, Piarists, and an unnamed order of nuns whose members will teach in eight schools nationalized by the government in 1948, but now returned to the church.

The church-state agreement had been negotiated by the Bench of Hungarian Bishops independently of the Vatican (TIME, Sept. 11), in the hope of relieving growing Communist pressure on the church. Said the bishops in a pastoral letter read in Budapest churches last Sunday: “We were deeply afflicted, and nothing was left to us but to protest.”