Religious Policy and Dissent in Socialist Hungary: The Case of the Bokor Movement

Abstract

In 1976 a rumor spread among Hungarian Catholic priests that Lékai László, the newly inaugurated archbishop of Esztergom and official head of the Catholic Church in Hungary, had handed over to the bishops a list with the names of those priests who had to be suspended or displaced from their parishes because of pressure from the state. One thing was common to these priests: they were presumed to be members of the so-called Bokor (“Bush”) movement. From the late 1960s onward, a new challenge arose within the Catholic Church against the religious policy of the Kádárist regime that endorsed strict control over the churches and did everything to keep the religion and religious practice out of the public sphere. A new semi-institutionalized form of religious organization was crystalizing in the form of base communities. Small but active local communities formed loose networks, which, with their few thousand members, became a sort of unofficial church within the official church and often functioned more or less independently from the supervision of the bishops. The new form attracted young people and intellectuals in great numbers. One of these networks, the Bokor movement, with its charismatic leader Pater Bulányi,1 who, based on his theological ideas, encouraged his followers to live a radically uncompromising Christianity—“to live the Gospels”—stood out. The base communities in general, but especially the Bokor, soon provoked the antagonism of the socialist state.