Venerable József Mindszenty

József Mindszenty was a Hungarian cardinal of the Catholic Church who served as Archbishop of Esztergom and leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary from 1945 to 1973. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, for five decades "he personified uncompromising opposition to fascism and communism in Hungary". During World War II, Mindszenty was imprisoned by the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party. After the war, he opposed communism and communist persecution in his country. As a result, he was tortured and given a life sentence in a 1949 show trial that generated worldwide condemnation, including a United Nations resolution. After eight years in prison, Mindszenty was freed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and granted political asylum by the United States embassy in Budapest. He lived there for the next fifteen years. He was finally allowed to leave the country in 1971, and died in exile in 1975 in Vienna, Austria. His cause for sainthood was opened in 1993 and Pope Francis declared him Venerable in 2019. Mindszenty was born on 29 March 1892 in Csehimindszent, Vas County, Austria-Hungary, to József Pehm and Borbála Kovács. His father was a magistrate. He attended St Norbert's Premonstratensian High Grammar School in Szombathely, before entering the Szombathely Diocesan Seminary in 1911. Mindszenty was ordained a priest by Bishop János Mikes on 12 June 1915, the Feast of the Sacred Heart. In 1917, the first of his books, Motherhood, was published. He was arrested by Mihály Károlyi's progressive government on 9 February 1919 for speaking out against its 'socialist policies', then rearrested by the communist Béla Kun government on 31 July that year. In 1939, Mindszenty urged his followers to vote against the Arrow Cross Party. In 1940, he published a pamphlet, "The Green Communism", in which he characterized the Hungarian Nyilas Nazi Movement as diabolic and as evil as the communists. Green was the color of the Nyilas uniform.