The Trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty from the Perspective of Seventy Years

When Russian tanks brutally invaded Ukrainian territory in February 2022 and the leaders of the country decided to heroically resist, memories of Soviet occupations and brave resistance appeared. One of the most famous and bravest fighters against the Stalinist take-over and radical transformation of his country was the Hungarian cardinal, Archbishop József Mindszenty, Primate of the Catholic Church since 1945, who was arrested and put on a show trial only three-and-a-half years later. Mindszenty had managed to mobilize hundreds of thousands of Hungarians in a campaign dedicated to St Mary, patroness of Hungary, a campaign everybody understood was in defense of the national character of the nation’s institutions and its very soul. In February 2019, an international conference on the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty and similar acts of Communist suppression of church leaders in the areas controlled by Stalin and his allies, brought together twenty-seven specialists from Hungary as well as Albania, Croatia, Czechia, France, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. At about the same time, Pope Francis decreed Mindszenty a “Venerable” in another stage of the ongoing canonization process.

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