Peace is a community project for this Hungarian Roman Catholic family

Mennonite Central Committee
Saturday, 29 April 2000

AKRON, Pa. --Adult baptism, conscientious objection to military service. Many North American Mennonites take these foundations of Anabaptism for granted. But for a Roman Catholic community in Hungary, these are new and exciting ideas -- beliefs worth suffering for.

In 1945 in Hungary a Roman Catholic priest began a Christian pacifist movement, known as Bokor, which focused on love of enemies and the poor. The movement, facing disapproval from Hungary's communist government, and later even from the Vatican, went underground. Today Bokor consists of some 200 groups operating throughout the country, involved in community service and writing about non-violence and peace. Bokor is one of Mennonite Central Committee's (MCC) partners in peace work in the Balkans and other Eastern European countries.

Bokor leader Gyula Simonyi recently visited North American Mennonite communities with his family to share their story and to learn from Mennonites' experiences.

Gyula and his wife Agnes are the parents of five children. According to their Roman Catholic tradition, they had their first three children baptized as babies. But by the time the fourth and fifth children were born, Gyula's and Agnes' reading of the Bible made them question the validity of infant baptism. Much to the dismay of their extended families, they did not take the children to church to be baptized.

"My mother cried to think that she had grandchildren who were not baptized," recalled Gyula. "She begged that we baptize the children as a birthday present for her. She was afraid they would go to hell."

Gyula faced not only family pressure but also government pressure to conform. Although Bokor had been a pacifist movement from the beginning, members didn't initially think refusing military service was part of pacifism. Conscription was a normal part of life for Hungarian men.

By the second half of the 1970s, however, Bokor members were discussing and debating the tough question of military service. From the end of the 1970s until 1989 some 30 Bokor members, including Gyula, served jail time for refusing to participate in the military.

"Agnes and I asked each other --is this really important?'" recalled Gyula. "We prayed a lot." Finally in 1983 Gyula sent his soldier ID back to the authorities. He was promptly arrested and sent to prison for 10 months — a shorter sentence than many since he had children.

Daughter Katalin, now 24, remembers that time. "We celebrated my eighth birthday in prison. We took a cake and presents to the prison and had a party there." She and her two younger siblings were "proud of our father but we couldn't tell anyone at school. We just counted the days until he could come home."

The family exchanged frequent letters. "My younger sister was learning to write. She wrote in big capital letters all around the page because she couldn't stay in the lines," recalled Katalin. "But Father had plenty of time to figure out what she was trying to say!" In 1990, as Hungary became more free, the country began offering alternatives to military service for conscientious objectors.

Today the whole Simonyi family works together at home to write, translate, publish and distribute Christian literature. One son serves as computer wizard and Web master for their Web site, which can be found at . Their Web site, with 1,516 pages, 999 images and 113 compressed-downloadable files, is a far cry from the days when Bokor operated underground. Gyula remembers how they painstakingly pecked out documents on an old typewriter, using 10 carbons to make duplicate copies. Despite these primitive methods, during the communist era Bokor illegally published more than 200 volumes of writings and translations.

In the late 1970s Bokor members learned about Mennonites through their discovery of "It is not lawful for me to fight" by Jean Michel Hornus, and Gyula translated the book into Hungarian. "Through our Roman Catholic education, we had learned about heretical sects in the Middle Ages, but didn't know Mennonites by name," said Gyula.

Gyula met his "first living Mennonite," as he puts it, in 1992 at a Church and Peace conference in Sheffield, England. The man he met was Alan Kreider, a Mennonite missionary. "We both stated that we had translated Hornus' book," Guyla recalled. Kreider had translated the book into English; Gyula has translated this English-language version into Hungarian.

"It was a great surprise, a miraculous meeting," said Gyula. Kreider advised Gyula to ask Hansuli Gerber, MCC's Europe program director, for funds to help publish Hornus' book in Hungarian. With some trepidation, Gyula did so. "I thought Hansuli must be very important, like the Archbishop," chuckled Gyula.

More recently Gyula and his family discovered the MCC publication "TREK ... Venture into a World of Enough." Gyula decided to translate the reflection guide into Hungarian and Serbian. He believed the message of simple living is an especially timely one for Hungarians who are emerging from socialism and are lured by Western consumerism.

"Working for more will not satisfy us in the way we think," he says. "It is possible to work less, earn less and be happy."

"Rapture of the Gospel," a book written by Bokor founder Gyorgy Bulanyi and Gyula Simonyi, contains more on Bokor's beliefs. The book is available in Provident bookstores or by contacting Kate Myers at MCC in Akron; phone (717) 859-1151.

For more information, or to contact Mennonite Central Committee, see their website at: www.mcc.org