THE TABLET, August 13th, 1955. VOL. 206, No. 6012

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN I 840

AUGUST 131h, 1955

NINEPENCE

The Lay A p o s to la te : Reflections for the World Congress of Pax Romana The R e lev an ce o f N ewm an: To Modern Educational Theory. By P. J. Dowling

M auritiu s and th e Seychelles: The Commitment to the Catholic Faith R om e and th e Christian East : I : The Pope’s Letter to Grottaferrata

II : Easier Relations in Greece

B ir th p la ce o f St. Pius X : A Place of Increasing Pilgrimage. By Wilfred Ryder F low er in g o f th e Rose: The Poetry of Dame Edith Sitwell. By Gerard Meath, O.P. C a th o lic Art and Artists: The Guild’s Dilemma. By John Bunting

B ooks R ev iew ed : Frontiers o f Astronomy, by Fred Hoyle; “Rise C a n a d i a n s by M.

Bellasis ; Portrait o f M y Mother, by Ann Bridge ; Surprising Mystics, by Herbert Thurston, S.J. ; World Population and World Food Supplies, by Sir John Russell ; Simon Peter the Fisherman, by Kurt Frieberger ; Folksongs and Folklore o f South Uist, by Margaret Fay Shaw ; But No Man Seen, by Victor Trefus ; M y Son is in the Mountains, by Daniel Nash ; The Murders at Crossby, by Edward Frankland ; Dalehead, by Helga Frankland ; and A Fable, by William Faulkner. Reviewed by Professor George Temple, F.R.S., Robert Cardigan, Isabel Quigly, Renée Haynes, Audrey

Donnithorne, A. H. N. Green-Armytage, Mark Dilworth, O.S.B., Anthony Lejeune and Christopher Hollis.

A TEST OF SINCERITY

S O far from the jamming of broadcasts having diminished since Geneva, it continues as relentlessly as ever, although there can be no better proof of a new spirit than a mutual readiness to hear everything the other side wants to say, and to let the public hear it. The Hungarian Government has chosen this moment for reprisals against Hungarians who have relatives working for Radio Free Europe at Munich. They are being deported and made to pay for their deportation to remote villages on the Rumanian frontier.

The Hungarian deportations, which are following the pattern of those of 1952, when some 70,000 men and women were sent to the East, are paralleled by similar efforts of the Polish and Czech regimes." M. Rakosi, the Hungarian Premier, had nothing to say about them when he spoke on Monday about friendlier relations with the West, and in particular with Hungary’s Western neighbours, Austria and Yugoslavia. His speech was also a reply to Marshal Tito’s recent accusation, directed against the Hungarian and Czech Communist leaders, that they refused to admit past mistakes. M. Khrushchev made his apology, blaming all the trouble between Soviet Russia and Yugoslavia on “Beria, Abakumov and others” when he arrived at Belgrade airport in May. M. Rakosi has now followed suit, placing the responsibility for the Rajk trial in 1949 on the former Hungarian police chief, Gabor Peter. But all these are lame apologies. To admit their full responsibility for the Budapest, Sofia and Prague.trials against “American-Zionist-Titoist” deviationists would be for these Communist leaders tantamount to political . suicide, for that series of murders, wholesale arrests and” deportations was much more than a mere political “mistake” . The Yugoslav demands for a full apology remain unfulfilled, and the reason is undoubtedly that there are many people in Moscow whose own position would be gravely endangered if the trials of those years were re-enacted and proved to have been unfounded. The chief responsibility lay with Stalin, but M. Khrushchev is not sufficiently master in the Kremlin to be able to go further than his own confessions at Belgrade airport.

The Hungarian situation in particular throws much light on the present comedy of Communist confessions and counterconfessions by which the Geneva Conference was psychologically initiated and accompanied. It remains uncertain whether the “release” of Cardinal Mindszenty and similar measures likely to have fruitful effects abroad were taken with foreign opinion in mind, or rather, as seems more likely today, also with an eye on the critical internal situation in Hungary. That country is not alone among the Communist satellites in undergoing a political crisis today, but the havoc created by ten years of Sovietization has been more deeply felt in Hungary than elsewhere.

The Hungarian deportations provide good subject-matter