Another Mindszenty

The stage, the actors and the well-rehearsed dialogue were almost the same; only the victim's name was different. In the same drab Budapest courtroom in which Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty was condemned, before the same Communist judge and prosecutor, Archbishop Joseph Groesz of Kalocsa last week went on trial for treason. Like Mindszenty, he "confessed."* Again the world saw the spectacle of a strong man broken and repeating in court what the Red scriptwriters dictated.

"I Can Even Die." Archbishop Groesz (rhymes, roughly, with worse) comes from the same region as Mindszenty, was bishop of Szombathely when Mindszenty served under him as a parish priest. Like peasant-born Joseph Mindszenty, whom he succeeded two years ago as head of the Roman Catholic church in Hungary, peasant-born Groesz is a man whose character and courage are beyond question. When in 1945 Nazi bullies broke into his palace at Kalocsa and ordered him with raised Tommy guns to get out of town, Groesz said: "I can face any kind of machine gun and if necessary I can even die at my desk."

Like Mindszenty, Groesz had opposed Communism; he steadfastly refused to sign the Communists' phony peace petition or order his priests to do so.

Pet Villains. The charges against Groesz: black-marketeering, helping non-Communist refugees to escape to the West, plotting with the U.S. to overthrow the Hungarian government. The Communist version of the "plot": Yugoslavia's

Tito was to invade Hungary, and Groesz would become regent, paving the way for a restoration of Austrian Pretender Otto of Habsburg. Groesz was to prepare for this coup by organizing resistance groups inside Hungary, including the boy scouts. The U.S. would finance the whole affair. Once in power, Groesz would revoke Communist land reforms, return the big landowners and capitalists to power.

The story, which neatly lumped all the Reds' pet villains, fit the old Communist pattern. Some small parts which sounded true, i.e., that Groesz was "in touch" with the Vatican and the U.S. embassy, simply did not add up to treason; the really damaging details were plainly fantastic. But under questioning from Judge Vilmos Old (a former Nazi), Groesz--reported to be "calm and deliberate"--obediently confessed to the whole story.

This time, the West had a better idea of how the Communists did it: Robert Vogeler, the U.S. businessman who had been imprisoned by the Hungarian Communists for 17 months, had told how his jailers tortured him, physically and mentally, until he was ready to make his own false confession (TIME, May 7).

The Purpose. Eight alleged accomplices of Groesz--four Catholic churchmen, a Hungarian employee of the U.S. legation in Budapest, a former lawyer, a former member of Parliament and a former government official--also poured forth confessions.

The trial's obvious purpose: to crush Catholic resistance to the Communist regime, which Hungary's masters apparently had not yet accomplished, despite the Mindszenty trial and last year's church-state agreement liquidating most Catholic orders and putting all parish schools under state control. The U.S. State Department called Budapest's legal farce "a continuation of Communist efforts to suppress all human rights and liberties ... to destroy the moral and religious influence of the churches."

Said the Vatican: "Against this iniquitous negation of truth and justice we utter our most disdainful protest and severest condemnation."

* A significant difference: the Mindszenty trial was attended by two U.S. newsmen; this time foreign newsmen were barred. The only reports on what went on in the courtroom during the Groesz trial came from Hungarians working for U.S. news services. These reporters were allowed to phone accounts to London, and Budapest insisted they were not censored. But as citizens of a Communist state they were responsible for every sentence they uttered.

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