Hungarian Bishops Seek Forgiveness for Communist Collaboration
On the 70th anniversary of the crushed 1956 uprising, the bishops identified the regime’s principal architects and called for reconciliation grounded in truth.
On November 4, 2026—the 70th anniversary of the Soviet military intervention that crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—Hungary released secret police files from the 1949–1989 Communist era. The same day, the Hungarian bishops’ conference issued a statement asking forgiveness on behalf of Church members who collaborated with the dictatorship.
“Some of them genuinely collaborated with the communist regime, passing on confidential information about members of the community and others. On their behalf, we ask the victims and their families for forgiveness,” the bishops wrote. They noted that others had been tortured or blackmailed, that some produced reports containing little or no meaningful information, and that people the authorities merely tried to recruit but who refused still received an index card.
The bishops cautioned that some documents were destroyed, so the surviving archive does not give a complete picture. They called for recognition of the Church’s resistance to the regime and for a careful appraisal of the newly published material. An online portal accompanying the release makes searchable the names of tens of thousands of people blacklisted or recruited under the regime.
Persecution and the True Architects of Dictatorship
In their statement the bishops recalled the scale of suffering inflicted on the Church. Under the dictatorship more than 100 priests and religious were killed and about 2,000 were imprisoned or forcibly relocated. Most religious orders were banned, leaving roughly 11,500 religious men and women without means of subsistence. Church-founded communities, youth movements and cultural associations were outlawed, and the large majority of Church-run schools were nationalized.
“The Churches were among the main targets of the dictatorship,” they wrote. They insisted that “the main accomplices of the Communist past were not the recruited people, but the officers who ran it, the leaders of the party-State and those who actively made the dictatorship work,” and that reconciliation “can only be achieved through the truth.”
Ad Limina Visit in Rome
On the morning of November 5, during their ad Limina Apostolorum visit, the Holy Father received the bishops of Hungary in audience at the Vatican. The encounter comes as the Hungarian Church continues to confront the moral wounds left by decades of totalitarian rule and to seek, through truth and repentance, a path of healing for victims and communities still marked by that history.