Egyház és állambiztonság

Abstract

Church and state security. In the wake of the change of regime in Hungary a number of memoirs were born. Most of them reports about calumniated priests suffering in the prisons of the dictatorship. What increases their value is that they constitute the subjective dimension of recent history, which makes a persuasive impression on the reader, as the eyewitnesses of the events confess about the history they experienced. However, the genre of memoirs has their own limits from the point of view of history. The emotions of the individuals can distort the events and can put the matter in a specific light. The perspective of evaluative logic is missing from the consequences drawn. Those who remember can only see, and let seem, the church policy of dictatorships through the lens of their own sufferings, showing only one side of reality. If we look at the efforts of recent past from above, it turns out that the picture drawn of the church policy of the Kádár era is as dark as the picture drawn of the church policy of the Rákosi era. Is this consequence true? If so, what can be the explanation for that?