Photo: Lambert Attila/ Magyar Kurír
On January 15, András Fejérdy, the PI of the Sovereignty research project held a talk in Budapest at the invitation of the Association of the Catholic Parish of the Sacred Heart in Városmajor (VAKE). The presentation was part of the series commemorating the victims of the national socialist Arrow Cross rule in 1944-45.
Fejérdy’s talk positioned the Hungarian Catholic Church vis-à-vis the interwar regime of the regent Miklós Horthy and its Christian conservative state ideology. The presenter outlined numerous traumas of the Church in 1919-20; the anti-clerical Hungarian Soviet Republic and the Trianon peace treaty after which the higher and lower clergy saw the emerging “counter-revolutionary” system as a protective polity with which they could identify to a certain extent. In the 1930s the Catholic Church (led by the primate-archbishop Serédi) sought to represent its interests in a negotiated manner, avoiding confrontation in the public eye.
The talk focused on the institutionalized racial discrimination and anti-Semitism of the era. The presentation distinguished “clerical” anti-Semitism aiming the mass assimilation and conversion to Christianity from the anti-Semitism based on race theory. (The two currents were in many cases interconnected though.) Secular legislation “superseding” the sacraments of the Church (the three “Jewish laws”; 1938-41) eventually led to public outcry from the Catholic high clergy, abandoning its benevolent position towards the regime. After the German occupation in March 1944 the deportations of Hungarians of Jewish and Roma origin started, a process that was actively opposed and resisted by many members of the lower and higher clergy, monastic orders and spiritual movements.