Breathing Room in Hungary

In Pope Paul's Vatican diplomacy, realpolitik blends with visionary hope: a so-so deal is better than none if it gives promise of some day leading to attainment of the church's goals. Last week, at the Foreign Ministry in Budapest, Monsignor Agostino Casaroli of the Vatican's Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs signed an agreement with Hungarian Bureaucrat Jozsef Prantner that will provide a small but significant bit of breathing room for the country's 6,000,000 Roman Catholics.

Casaroli, who recently negotiated the disposition of Roman Catholic property with Moslem Tunisia, took over the job of dealing with Hungary from Vienna's Franziskus Cardinal Koenig. Originally, the Vatican tried to arrange the departure of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty from asylum in the U.S. legation in Budapest, hoping that an agreement about the status of the church in Hun gary would follow. When that approach failed, Casaroli started dickering for some freedom for the church, on the theory that sooner or later a solution to Mindszenty's problem might be found.

The first concrete result was the Pope's appointment of six Hungarian bishops; the Communists dropped their insistence that any appointments to the hierarchy be chosen from the Red-lining "peace priests." The church agreed to let priests take an oath of loyalty to the government and gave jurisdiction over Rome's Pontifical Ecclesiastical Hungarian Institute--run by exiled priests who specialize in anti-Communist propaganda--to the country's bishops.

The agreement noted that several other questions of church-state relations remain to be negotiated. Among them are how much freedom the bishops will have to rule their dioceses and communicate with Rome, and the right of the church to carry on religious education. As for Mindszenty, he has always insisted that he could not leave Hungary until freedom for his church has been guaranteed. Now that the Vatican and the Hungarian Communists are ready and willing to negotiate, most observers think that his leverage is gone and the proud, heroic prelate will soon leave for Rome.

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