End of a Private Cold War

End of a Private Cold War As the black Mercedes-Benz limousine rolled through the Vatican's Arch of Bells early last week, Pope Paul VI himself stood waiting in the garden. When the car door opened, the Pope reached in to help his exhausted guest out of the back seat, then embraced him warmly. Paul led the aged man to an apartment in St. John's Tower and --in the ultimate gesture of papal humility--gave the pectoral cross and bishop's ring he was wearing to the visitor.

The august honors, as the world quickly learned, were for JOzsef Cardinal Mindszenty, now 79. After 15 years of cramped and tightly watched asylum in the U.S. embassy at Budapest, Mindszenty had reluctantly agreed to accept "perhaps the heaviest cross of my life" and leave his native Hungary. The war between the church and Communism had long since softened into an edgy coexistence, and the fierce old freedom fighter had become less a hero than an embarrassment.

A Clockwise Path. The Mindszenty who came to Rome was hardly the Mindszenty that the Western world had had engraved so long and so indelibly on its memory. Mindszenty now is a tired old man, his firm jaw softened by the flesh of age, his pure white, close-cropped hair almost gone. Mindszenty's health was at least one factor in Paul's strong plea for him to come to Rome; the Cardinal's feet are inflamed with phlebitis, and he walks only with difficulty. But it is amazing that his health is as good as it is, for he has spent the past 23 years in one form of imprisonment or another.

Even as a young parish priest, Mindszenty was no stranger to jails: he was imprisoned for his outspoken opposition to the short-lived Communist takeover of Bela Kun in 1919. His rise in the Catholic hierarchy was a reward for his unflinching loyalty to the church and the people of Hungary, both of which he defended against a grim succession of political tyrannies. During World War II. he fearlessly denounced the Nazis and aided Hungarian Jews; finally, in 1944, Hungary's Fascist regime imprisoned him. After the war, by then a Cardinal and the nation's highest-ranking bishop. Mindszenty fought the encroachments of Communism, marshaling Catholics in massive demonstrations. His arrest on the day after Christmas in 1948 was hardly a surprise. Then came the trial, on trumped-up charges of treason, spying and black-marketeering, of a man who had obviously been tortured to his physical and mental limits. He was sentenced to death--a sentence that was commuted to life imprisonment and later, in 1955, to house arrest.

For a few bloody days in November 1956, as the country rose in revolt against Soviet rule, it seemed as if Budapest might be the Cardinal's own once again. Freedom fighters released him, and his stern face became as familiar an image of those days as the bullet-pocked walls. But then the Soviet tanks swept in, and Mindszenty fled to the safety of the U.S. embassy, where he remained, in effect a prisoner again. "Let him sit there and rot," Hungarian officials told the Americans. "He doesn't inconvenience us and he embarrasses you."

The Cardinal lived abstemiously in a top-floor apartment, worked on his memoirs and a history of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary. Outside, Communist agents kept a 24-hour watch. Inside, on strolls in the embassy garden, the Cardinal would pace the same clockwise path he had learned in prison. Under international rules of embassy asylum, American officials could not allow him to make any public statements.

When Pope John XXIII decided to seek better relations with the Hungarian regime in order to win concessions for the church, such as the naming of new bishops and an end to restrictions on religious education, his own Cardinal proved to be as troublesome an obstacle as the atheists. Vatican diplomats spent years flying to Budapest to bargain with both the regime and the Cardinal, while the U.S. acted the role of embarrassed host and bystander.

Act of Submission. It was apparently the Pope's own firmly expressed wishes that finally caused Mindszenty to relent last week, as an act of obedient submission. He retains the title of Primate (senior bishop) of Hungary, as he wished, but gave up his dreams of celebrating a final public Mass and praying at his mother's grave. And he won only an amnesty, not the exoneration he had wanted, from the Hungarian government. He had also demanded freedom to write and speak about his experiences. Vatican sources insist that no deal was made with Hungary to gag Mindszenty, but they say that the Cardinal will maintain silence in order to avoid embarrassing Pope Paul.

Some reports claim that Mindszenty plans to settle in Vienna, but that might still be too close for comfort, for both Hungarian and Austrian authorities. Wherever he lives, Mindszenty will keep a close eye on the Hungarians' struggle to get the regime to honor its commitments on such things as bishops and schools. The church has less freedom in Hungary than in Yugoslavia, a relatively open Marxist society, or in Poland, with its large powerful church. But Hungarian Catholics are better off than those in Czechoslovakia since that nation was invaded by Soviet troops in 1968. Whether things now improve in Hungary remains to be seen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.