Jozsef Mindszenty

Jozsef Mindszenty was the Hungarian primate who was tortured into a show trial by the communists and then lived fifteen years inside the American embassy in Budapest. He was imprisoned first by the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and again by the Arrow Cross fascists in 1944, which is the part of his record his later opponents preferred not to mention. Made archbishop of Esztergom in 1945, he opposed the communist takeover directly and without much political calculation, particularly over the nationalisation of the Catholic schools. He was arrested on Boxing Day 1948, held for thirty-nine days, beaten and drugged, and produced at a trial in February 1949 where he confessed to treason and currency offences in a voice observers described as not his own; he had written a note before his arrest saying that any confession attributed to him would be the product of human frailty. The sentence was life. Freed by the 1956 revolution, he broadcast support for it, and when the Soviet tanks returned days later he walked into the United States legation and stayed until 1971, an embassy guest who could not leave the building without being arrested and would not leave the country. The Vatican eventually asked him to go, as part of its opening to the eastern governments, and he went to Vienna unreconciled and was removed from his see. He died in 1975 and was reburied in Esztergom in 1991. The trial was studied abroad as a model of how a confession could be manufactured, and it contributed directly to Western assumptions about communist justice for the next decade. His fifteen years in the legation are the longest political asylum ever granted inside an embassy. Cardinal Mindszenty remained unreconciled to the Vatican's Ostpolitik to the end, believing it conceded to governments that would not last.

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