The Interpretations of a Peculiar Meeting. More Data to the László Pap Case

Abstract

In my study I am dealing with a microhistory episode of the church policy maneuvers of the socialist state in Hungary from the time of the retaliations after the 1956 revolution. In the centre the internationally acknowledged vice bishop and dean of the Budapest Reformed Theological Academy, László Pap stood. In the Kádár era he was unlawfully deprived of his offices and sentenced to inner exile because of his leading role in the Reform Movement of the Reformed Church. He had been a member of the resistance and participated in saving the persecuted during the Second World War. As a part of this activity he built out very close relations with the World Council of Churches. Thus his fate was followed by the attention of the international church diplomacy. Therefore it was a very sensitive problem for the communist party and church leaders at home to solve his situation. In my study I compare the reports of independent sources about a secret meeting in 1961, which tried to settle Pap’s unlawful situation. Among these there are an English summary that was sent in a con-spiratorial way to Willem A. Visser’t Hooft, the executive secretary of the World Council of Churches and also agent reports made for the Hungarian secret police. These documents let us look into the manip-ulations of the church policy of the oneparty state, as well as into the different strategies of the resistance and adaptation.