The Cardinal
IN SILENCE I SPEAK. By George N. Shuster. (Gollancz, 21s.) THIS book on Cardinal Mindszenty and the Communist regime in Hungary is, as the publishers point out, highly topical. And many of its chapters—in particular those on the peasantry and the workers—show the intolerable background to the present national rising in revealing detail. That it centres on the Cardinal. and is in effect a piece of hagiography, is less satisfactory.
Mindszenty is now reported to have taken refuge in the American Legation after a few days' liberty. And after his fright. ful ordeal our main feeling for him must be of sympathy and admiration. Yet determination by itself is a quite inadequate quality for the leader of a not entirely non-political Church in a tricky and dangerous political situation. The leaders of Catholicism in the other Eastern European countries—Wyszynski, Beran and Stephinac—have all suffered equally. Yet all of them succeeded in gaining time and obtaining concessions for their churches. Mindszenty was more intransigent than his Czech and Polish colleagues. Though anti-Nazi he subscribed to an extreme rightist traditionalism, as they did not. And it seems clear that he misunderstood and mishandled the situation. He chose as his main ground in resisting the Communists the schools issuer Secularisation of the schools, however, was the one important matter on which liberals, radicals and socialists, both in Hungary and in the West, could not sympathise with the Catholics. And he seems to have overestimated the impregnability of his own position, with the result that when arrest came he was more un- settled by the shock than were the other Catholic leaders, from none of whom did it prove possible to extract any sort of 'confession.'
His trial (about which Dr. Shuster surprisingly says practically nothing) was, of course, a farce. But it was a farce of a different sort to the usual confession trial. Rajk, for instance, confessed in long set speeches to a complete structure of impossible crime. The Cardinal simply answered shortly a series of questions on minor points; his own admissions were none of them to felonious acts, and all of them were quite plausible, and quite probably true. But he failed to defend himself, and the court was thus able to inflate these inadequate indiscretions into a lot of wholly un- justified assumptions and deductions. Mindszenty seems to have been simply baffled and outmanceuvred.
A predominantly Catholic-Democratic resistance to Com- munism may perhaps be feasible; but not apparently in Hungary, or under Mindszenty. The present revolution was primarily an urban action, led by a vanguard of socialist-minded students and workers, to the air of radical democracy's Marseillaise. As a story of human suffering, Mindszenty's must appeal to us all. When Dr. Shuster turns it into an argument for a particular politico-religious standpoint his argument breaks down.
J. E. M. ARDEN
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