Never shall I depart

On October 31 Hungarian bishop and martyr Zoltán Lajos Meszlényi (1892-1951) will be raised to the heights of the altars. He had sworn: “Never shall I leave Christ the Good Shepherd and our Church”. The Servant of God kept his promise and remained faithful to his ministry to the point of sacrificing his own life. Auxiliary bishop of Esztergom since 1937, in 1950 he was arrested by the Communist police and deported to a concentration camp where he was tortured to death. Bishop Meszlényi will be beatified in Esztergom, during the Mass presided over by Cardinal Péter Erdö, archbishop of Budapest- Esztergom and Primate of Hungary. The beatification formula will be read on behalf of the Holy Father by Msgr. Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints.From Budapest to Rome. Meszlényi was born on January 2 1892 in Hatvan, a Hungarian village near Budapest. In 1909, upon the obtainment of the high-school diploma in classical studies with very good marks, thanks to the intervention of the then archbishop of Budapest Cardinal Kolos Vaszary, the local authorities granted him a scholarship to Rome. Here he attended the Germanic-Hungarian College and obtained a BA in philosophy, theology and canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1915 the Germanic-Hungarian College was moved to Innsbruck because of the War and he was ordained bishop by the then bishop of Bressanone.“Fidenter ac fideliter” . Once he returned to Hungary, primate cardinal Janos Csernoch sent him to Esztergom where he was appointed secretary of the archiepiscopal notary. With the end of the War and the peace of Versailles Hungary gained independence from Austria and a large part of the territory and of the property of the archdiocese of Esztergom was handed over to the Czech Republic. With the death of Cardinal Csernoch in 1927, his successor, Cardinal Jusztinian Serédi decided to nominate the Servant of God as “the responsible of the administration of his home” and pronotary apostolic and primatial vicar in 1931. Three years later Meszlényi was appointed qualified university lecturer at the Archiepiscopal Academy of Law of Eger. In 1937 he was ordained titular bishop of Sinop and coadjutor of Esztergom. “Fidenter ac fideliter” is the phrase he chose as his Episcopal motto. The arrest and deportation. In 1945 Hungary was occupied by the Soviet armed forces. Since then an “Iron curtain”, the area of Soviet occupation, divided the Country from the rest of Europe. In 1946, with the “agrarian reform” (the laicization of Church property) ecclesial institutions such as schools, churches and hospices were outlawed. In 1950 religious orders were liquidated and Church persecution became a threatening reality. Bishop Meszlényi, a determined prelate, was too great an obstacle to the realization of Communist schemes. There ensued the need to get rid of this unbending man. He was secretly arrested and deported on June 29 1950, only 12 days after his appointment as Vicar Capitular of Esztergom, and was enwrapped in a veil of silence. At his trial the witnesses agreed that his arrest was motivated by a heinous odium fidei. Indeed, he had defended Cardinal Mindszenty, the then Primate of Hungary, in his firm stand against Communism and in defense of the Church, her dogmas, rights and clergy. Martyrdom and death. The witnesses said that the Servant of God suffered a “silent martyrdom”, whereby his tortures in prison and death had to be far from sight, as part of the regime’s diabolic design to keep priests’ arrests secret so as not to create martyrs. From the stories of Hungarian priests who survived imprisonment it emerges that the treatment reserved to Church members included inhuman physical and psychological tortures that caused the death of many. All that is known of the Servant of God is that after having been arrested on June 29 1950, he was deported to the camp of Kistarcsa on July 13 of the same year. These events were reconstructed thanks to the recovery at the State Security Service archives, by Professor Frigyes Kahler, of the so-called “service blueprint”, the original document drawn up by a State Police officer who was on guard on the day he was transferred to Kistarcsa. Following uncertainties on the year of his death (1951 or 1953), Cardinal Erdö solved the dilemma by stating: “The date of March 4 1951 must be considered truthful as proved by a fully reliable teste de visu present at the inhumation, and at the exhumation and translation on June 22 1966”. Since June 23 1966 the corpse of bishop Meszlényi reposes in Esztergom’s Basilica.