At a commemoration held in Pócspetri, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county on Wednesday, the Remembrance Day for the Victims of Communism, the Deputy Prime Minister for Hungarian communities abroad said that “Inhumane, and therefore godless dictatorships disappear down the drain of history.”
At the event held in the village’s Roman Catholic church, Zsolt Semjén said that although the Soviet Union – the “empire of Bolshevik atheism” – ended up on the “ash heap of history”, communism’s acts of terror are still being shown to Hungarians in memoirs and recollections published over the last quarter of a century.
The Christian-democrat politician added that, since people tend to forget, we must sometimes read Gulag memoirs, or keep in eternal memory the events during the protest in Pócspetri in June 1948 against the nationalisation of church-owned schools.
The Deputy Prime Minister recalled that the communist dictatorship which came to power in Hungary shortly after World War II did everything it could to crush and liquidate the Church, and in the post-war years it embarked upon the total elimination of institutions with a church background. Before the infamous so-called “blue ballot” election, the names of nearly one million voters – including priests, monks and nuns – were deleted from the new electoral register.
Mr. Semjén said that a law on the nationalisation of church-owned schools was passed in summer 1948, prior to which approximately eight hundred villages and towns had demanded abandonment of the draft legislation; the Deputy Prime Minister noted that it was under these tense circumstances that the State Protection Authority (ÁVH) fabricated the so-called Pócspetri-case.
After Mass on 3 June 1948, the villagers proceeded from the church to the town hall, protesting against their local church-owned school being thus seized. Two policemen tried to violently drive back the crowd, but accidently one of them fatally injured himself with his rifle. The ÁVH arrested the local parish priest János Asztalos, teacher István Som and assistant notary Miklós Királyfalvi, as well as day-labourer Ferenc Kremper and a farm worker, Gábor Vitéz. Mr. Semjén reminded his audience that these five – together with most of the village’s adults – were brutally beaten, and three people later died from their injuries.
In the verdict of the summary trial of 11 July, János Asztalos and Miklós Királyfalvi were sentenced to death and István Som was sentenced to life imprisonment. Királyfalvi was hanged that night, while the sentence of Father Asztalos was commuted to life imprisonment by President Zoltán Tildy.
Mr. Semjén said that these events were followed by the arrest of Cardinal József Mindszenty and his show trial and sentencing in February 1949; he added that after this, forced emigration, imprisonment and internment of a number of Christian-democrat politicians led to the elimination of the only significant parliamentary party.
The Deputy Prime Minister reminded his audience that the communists achieved their goal, managing to eliminate the Church as a societal factor in public life, and throughout the decades of dictatorship over 1,200 priests suffered imprisonment or internment. However, he also noted that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”: in other words, despite the hardships, over the last seventy years the local church community produced a number of priests and a bishop.
After a Mass and a special ceremony, Mr. Semjén unveiled a commemorative plaque to János Asztalos on the wall of the prayer house, which was blessed by Nándor Bosák, Bishop of Debrecen-Nyíregyháza.
(Prime Minister's Office/MTI)
