Perhaps few today in Hungary know the name of Béla Bangha SJ (1880-1940), but between the two World Wars, he was one of the chief reasons that Hungary was referred to as a country experiencing a Christian revival. Alongside Catholic Bishop Ottokár Prohászka and Franciscan friar István Zadravecz, this Jesuit friar was one of the ‘great three’ of contemporary Hungarian Catholicism. He was one of the main architects of bringing the Eucharistic World Congress to Hungary in 1938—but this is not why I am writing about his story today.
Born in Nyitra (today: Nitra, Slovakia), the scion of a gentry family that gained nobility in the 16th century for fighting the Turks, Bangha established a complete press empire for the contemporary Right, serving the needs of prestigious bourgeoise homes and simple Christian workers’ dwelling alike. The circulation of his papers reached some 150,000 copies, approaching the print numbers of some of the largest liberal papers, though not exceeding them. Dubbed an “apostle of the press” by his followers, Bangha’s papers were conservative, anti-Bolshevik—an important topic in a country which experienced a bloody communist coup d’état in 1919, Catholic to the extent that they were sometimes critical of the Protestant leadership of the country, and in the first few years of the interwar period, virulently antisemitic. Historians today, of course, largely cite the latter aspect of his work, and the criticism is well-deserved.
Yet, at the time of the death of the Jesuit priest, the Zionist Jewish newspaper Új Kelet in Kolozsvár (today: Cluj-Napoca, Romania) published a strange obituary:
Now that Father Bangha has died, one of the most merciless enemies of anti-Jewish laws and race theory in Hungary has gone to his grave. No, this is not a press error. Indeed: the most ruthless enemy of racist theory died with him.
This poses a conundrum: why was Bangha remembered by the contemporary Jewish press as an ‘enemy of racism’ if his papers were full of antisemitism in the early twenties? The answer seems to lie in Bangha’s understanding of the role of Catholicism in public life.
At the time, the Church was more influenced by the task of saving souls than by secular, political motivations. In Father Bangha’s mind, the ‘fishing for souls’ was above all. In 1927, he published a very clear guide to understanding and evaluating his own work, titled The Apostle’s Short Guide – A Practical Introduction to the Main Tasks of Wordly Apostolate. The book—strangely akin to of Josemaría Escrivá’s later works—combined divine vocation and worldly practicality. It began by asking, “Why is apostolate necessary?’” Then it replied: “Apostolate is necessary because the most important thing in the world is the salvation of souls.”
His broad missionary plans would follow him throughout his life. We find such comments in his diary all through the 1920s and 1930s: “Time is rushing on, we are nearing the end, where no one can work anymore, and what will happen to those whom I might have been able to save? … I am driven and tormented [by] the thought of saving as many as possible from eternal death.” His anxiety is similarly illustrated by the words he used to warn his sister—and my own paternal great-grandmother—Klotild Bangha at her confirmatio: “People fall into Hell like leaves fall in the nearby forest.” This mentality also appeared in his criticism of racist antisemitism:
Christianity, as a religion, as a culture, speaks to all men: it tries to embrace the Indians, the gypsies, and the heathens too, to teach them about virtue. In this respect, therefore, we cannot reject anyone because he happens to have been born a Jew.
But apart from the mission to convert the masses, another little-known fact may have been behind Bangha’s aversion to race theory: although the family Bangha de Nagyjóka was a 16th century Hungarian noble family, Bangha’s paternal great-grandmother, Mária Rajn, had half-Jewish ancestry since her father, Mihály Rajn, was a Jew by birth. In the antisemitic perception of the time, of course, a bit of Jewish ancestry was already a corrupting factor: as the infamous pro-Nazi biologist Lajos Méhely wrote, anyone with a drop of Jewish blood “already feels Jewish and acts Jewish.” It is no accident, therefore, that Bangha refused to accept the antisemitic race theory, nor is it a coincidence that he kept deeply silent about his Jewish great-great-grandfather.
In 1921, the final break between the racist Right and Bangha came when he declared in October of that year that “to consider antisemitism as proof of Christianity” was “blasphemous.” A month later, he declared in his church:
racial interests are secondary to religious interests. Racial politics is nothing but explicit paganism. The baptised Jew is no longer a Jew, and we have no right to prevent him from being merged into the Hungarian people.
Moreover, he even suggested that Ashkenazi Jews were in fact of Khazar (Tatar) ancestry, “and thus—unfortunately —our sweet, close relatives in blood and origin.” Today, the ‘Khazar theory’ has been largely debunked by scholars, but back in the twenties, this myth was used not by the antisemites trying to undermine the Jewish claim to the Holy Land, but by the enemies of racial anti-Semitism. Bangha’s point of view, of course, would hardly be seen as philosemitism today, and could best be summed up as ‘anti-Judaism’—but perhaps the circumstances should also be taken into account.
At the same time, he fired some of his most virulently antisemitic journalists and hired new editors for his papers: people who arrived either from Catholic circles or from the liberal press. Most of his fired journalists took offense and started spreading the rumour that Bangha had been bought by the Jews. Not only the racist papers, but also Jewish outlets speculated that most of the new journalists hired by the priest were either Jews or recent converts to the Catholic faith. Ironically, the situation was contrary to that.
Bangha became persona non grata in the right-wing newspapers not belonging to his empire. “We were fools,” one of his ex-colleagues wrote in an angry article, “to think that the antisemitic cause was important to Bangha.” He received some of the labels that had been handed out by his own employees until not so recently: he was called a “traitor,” “worse than a Jew,” and “destructive” (a word almost exclusively used to describe communists). His apartment was raided by far-Right activists and police officers had to defend the priest and the Pallas printing house that printed his papers. The violence did not end there, and a few weeks after the break between Bangha and the racist Right they beat up a Catholic journalist of his at a rally, calling him a “lackey of the traitor Bangha.”
As an internal Jesuit report stated in early 1922, by then, Bangha was “hated by all”: by the Protestants for his Catholicism, by the Catholics for his constant need for attention and scandals, by the racists for his perceived philosemitism, and by the government for his loyalty to the Habsburgs. In late 1921, Bangha was sent by his superiors to the United States and, in the autumn of 1923, to Rome to stop his press venture from bringing the Jesuit order into disrepute. Bangha, as a dutiful monk, bowed his head to his superiors’ decision.
The story merits attention from many aspects today. In the age of cancel culture—which does not spare those who have been dead for a long time—we are too hasty to judge entire careers based on a few off-hand remarks. In fact, a full, thorough understanding of life trajectories cannot be achieved without time-consuming research by historians. Meanwhile, the noble task of saving souls once undertaken by Bangha seems to be lost from conservative politics. Much is said today about borders, social policy, and war—little is said about spiritual renewal and reclaiming Christianity’s role in public life. The story is a clear example of how racism and Christianity have no place side by side; and it all fits into the little-known story of a few months from the life of an Eastern European Catholic priest back in 1921.
