Francis Berger
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My Village's Most Notable Native Son Was Worthy of Freedom

1/19/2023

4 Comments

 
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Should you ever travel to the small, non-descript Hungarian village I call home, you will inevitably encounter a large image of a bespectacled priest affixed to the rectory wall facing Main Street. The image depicts the village’s most famous native son, Kálmán Hadarits, who is better known as Vendel Endrédy.

​Hadarits changed his name shortly after he was ordained into the priesthood. The adopted surname is a direct reference to the village from which he hailed, which was known simply as Endréd at the time of his birth in 1895 (it is now called Fertőendréd).
After he completed his studies at a Benedictine school in Györ, Endrédy became a monk, entered teaching, and was eventually elected as the Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey in Zirc, but he is remembered primarily for a choice he made in 1948 when he was a fifty-three-year-old man.

The Second World War devastated the abbey’s schools; however, the devastation of war could not rival the devastation the communists inflicted upon the schools when they took them over in 1948. With no hope on the horizon, Endrédy fled to Rome, but he did not stay there long. Knowing he faced imprisonment or worse, Endrédy chose to return to his beloved abbey in Zirc.  Upon his return, he brought a message from Pope Pius XII to Cardinal Mindszenty, who the communists had placed under house arrest on December 26, 1948.

In 1950, the communists took over the Cistercian Abbey itself. Endrédy was the last to leave, but he did not get far. The communists arrested him four days later in Budapest. After surviving a ruthless regimen of torture, Endrédy was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 1951. The communists forced him to spend the first six of these in utter isolation where he was denied practically everything that may have maintained a connection to the outside world. He was even denied reading material, writing utensils, and paper. After these six terrible years, the communists transferred the 62-year-old Endrédy to a home for aged clerics in Pannonhalma, where lived until his death in 1981.

Whenever I read about a man like Endrédy, I can’t help but compare him to our current crop of clergy and reflect upon the actions churches took during the birdemic in 2020.

Endrédy’s escape to Rome in 1948 is perfectly understandable and justifiable. The situation in Hungary had become hopeless. His freedom and life were both in peril. He could have easily continued his career in Rome. He could have taken a safe and cushy job somewhere in the Vatican, and from that position he could have devised some way to liberate his abbey from the communists. Or he could have just put it all behind him and bidden his time until communism weakened or collapsed.

But he didn’t do any of that. He chose to return. He knew he would be arrested, humiliated, tortured, and imprisoned when he returned, but he returned anyway. When I read about a man like Endrédy, I can’t help but wonder what he would have done had he been the priest of the little church in my village in 2020. Would he have locked the doors as the current priest did? Or would he have chosen differently?

It’s difficult to say. If anything might provide a clue, it is Endrédy’s writings. After suffering through six years of isolation, Endrédy was finally granted access to writing utensils and notebooks. In one of those notebooks, he wrote the following:

Lord, grant that we may be worthy of freedom.

This, from the pen of a man who – from the perspective of most modern people – escaped to freedom in 1948, but decided to give up this freedom and return to his home country to be tortured and imprisoned – which begs the question:

What is the nature of the freedom to which Endrédy refers?

Well, I posit it’s the sort of freedom that nearly all mainstream churches blatantly rejected in 2020 under the guise of loving one’s neighbor.

Speaking of love, Endrédy also had something interesting to say on that subject:

The world has become hell, and the people no longer believe. A superhuman task awaits us; to once again convince the world that God loves. 
4 Comments
NLR
1/19/2023 21:22:26

Great post.

Reply
Michelle
1/20/2023 04:15:03

For what purpose did he return, or why did he feel he had to return?

Reply
Francis Berger
1/20/2023 09:20:35

@ Michelle - I could answer that question by asking one of my own. The communists could have simply killed Endrédy before he left the country or upon his return – why didn’t they?

The short answer to your question: Endrédy understood that the fundamental nature of the war in which he was embroiled was spiritual, not merely political or ideological. He recognized that the worldly cause against the communists was lost, but that the spiritual cause against the communists was not. Endrédy understood that being "free for" God meant infinitely more than being "free from" the communists.

In the interest of keeping yesterday’s blog post brief, I skipped over the details of Endrédy's departure and subsequent return to Hungary in 1948, but I'll expand on a few of those details now.

Though it was technically possible to escape from Hungary via clandestine means after the war, men of Endrédy's stature couldn't do so. The only way men like Endrédy could leave was to petition the communists for a special passport that would allow them to travel abroad for a set duration of time. Put another way, people like Endrédy had to ask the communists for permission to leave. The communists would not grant this permission unless the applicants promised, under oath, to return before the passport expired.

The true spiritual aims of worldly evil reveal themselves in such arrangements. As stated above, the communists only granted permission to those who swore oaths to return. Here's the catch, people who were granted such passports knew they would be arrested the moment they stepped back into Hungary. Thus, the tacit spiritual objectives behind these travel permits become remarkably clear.

The communists did not want the travel permit owners to return; they wanted the permit owners to embrace the freedom they had been "granted" on the communists' terms.
Thus, those who chose to stay abroad under these conditions were doubly defeated. First, because their physical “escape” was not an escape at all. On the contrary, it was little more than an admission of defeat and a confirmation of the communists’ worldly gains. Second, those who left for good under the conditions the communists established spiritually affirmed that they preferred freedom from the communists over freedom for God.

Endrédy understood that his return was a thumb in Satan’s eye. On the one hand, it was an annoying challenge to the supposed nature of the worldly gains the communists had made. On the other hand, it demonstrated Endrédy’s willingness to fight and win the spiritual war.

The communists could have simply killed Endrédy upon his return, but they didn’t. Their excuse was that they did not want to make a martyr of him, which is remarkably true.

The last thing the communists wanted to do was kill men like Endrédy while they were aligned with God.

Though the communists openly rejected the spiritual, their actions reveal the spiritual objectives underpinning their actions. Death was inadequate; damnation was the ultimate aim.

So they went to work on Endrédy and did everything they could to break him spiritually. They humiliated him, degraded him, and tortured him, but Endrédy would not break.

Despite appearances to the contrary, Endrédy emerged victorious from his war with evil because he understood the spiritual reality of what he was involved in.

He showed the communists that his spiritual freedom was more powerful than the freedom they had offered him. Moreover, he also demonstrated the superiority of his God-aligned agency. He showed the communists that their victories and gains in the world had not won them the one thing they truly coveted.

Reply
Lady Mermaid link
1/21/2023 03:53:07

This is beautiful. My faith is so shallow in comparison. It's an everyday battle not to assimilate the System messaging and consent to its objectives.

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