PITFALLS OF REVEALING THE PAST

Bishop Veres: ’There is a political campaign against the Church’. ’We do not believe in the possibility of revealing the past from all aspects and we find it most shocking that the bill of the ’agent law’ limits even these possibilities as it wishes to exclude information about people who had operated and used the network of secret agents’, Bishop András Veres, secretary of the Conference of Hungarian Catholic Bishops said.

He claimed that several documents had been annihilated or forged at the period of the change of regime and all the priests were frequently checked, harrassed and persecuted by state security officials. He said the political campaign against the Church was part of the Socialist-liberal attack which shows the influence of a cosmopolitan, globalist world view. Yesterday the presidium of the Hungarian Lutheran Church issued a statement requesting the pardon of all people who had suffered from the activities of agents within the Lutheran church and suggested to set up a church committee to examine the cases of people suspected of having been informers of the secret police.

Translated by Péter Szentmihályi Szabó