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This charge was a typical Communist distortion. Truth was that one day in 1944, Hungary's Nazi dictator Ferenc Sza-lasi had decided to set up headquarters in the bishop's palace. Mindszenty, who was sheltering about 100 Jews in his cellar at the time, declared that so long as he was bishop, none of Szalasi's men would enter. The Nazis promptly occupied the palace. The police found a sizable store of clothes which Mindszenty had quietly collected for Hungary's persecuted and pillaged Jewry. The clothes included underwear which Szalasi had wanted for his own troops.
Mindszenty, the son of a poor peasant, had risen to the highest church office in his land. Some of Hungary's peasants, who used to flock together in crowds of 45,000 to hear him speak, have seen him, even in recent years, working the land at his mother's five-acre farm in the village of Mindzent. Hungarians, who were now asked to believe that Mindszenty was an anti-Semite, remembered his courageous wartime sermons attacking Naziism, in which he declared that "antiSemitism and the proceedings against the Jews are the shame of civilization."
"For Righteousness Sake." The reason for Mindszenty's arrest was plain. The Communists wanted to demonstrate that no power remained in Hungary that could stand against them. The demonstration might not prove entirely successful. Two days after Mindszenty's arrest was made public, the Minister of the Interior summoned four of Hungary's Roman Catholic bishops who, jointly with their Primate, had staunchly held out against a government plan designed to make the Catholic clergy virtually employees of the state. The minister told the four holdouts, on pain of imprisonment, to resign. They flatly refused. Nevertheless, the Communist press trumpeted the news that Hungary's Bench of Bishops had agreed to their terms.
Last week, the Hungarian Communists had the remarkable gall to invite the Vatican to negotiate an agreement on the status of the Hungarian church, "regardless of the personal case of Mindszenty." The Vatican rejected the overtures as a "puerile maneuver." Earlier, the Holy See had declared: "Whereas it has been dared to lay hands sacrilegiously on a very eminent cardinal . . . all those who have performed the aforesaid crime have incurred excommunication . . . and have been declared infamous . . ."
As for Mindszenty, the Hungarian government formally announced that "under the weight of evidence against him [he] made a confession." But, so far, the Communists have not published any confession, with or without his signature. Cardinal Mindszenty, despite the human frailty he knew, was a strong man. Just before his arrest, he had written: "This is now the word of the Sermon on the Mount: 'Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."