Vilmos Apor

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Vilmos Apor (born February 29, 1892 in Segesvár , Austria-Hungary , † April 2, 1945 in Győr , Hungary ) was Bishop of Győr and is a blessed of the Catholic Church .

Vilmos Apors statue in Budapest

Life

priest

Vilmos (Wilhelm) Apor was the 7th and penultimate child of Baron Gábor Apor and Comtesse Fidelia Pálffy von Erdöd (* 1863). His father (* 1851) was a Föispán ( Obergespan , Comes Comitatu = district captain, district prefect), who died in Baden near Vienna in 1898 . His mother wanted her children to have a religious upbringing. Vilmos attended the Jesuit College in Kalksburg ( Vienna ) for six years and then the Jesuit high school in Kalocsa ( Bács-Kiskun County ).

In 1910 he entered the seminary of the Diocese of Győr , but was sent to Innsbruck to study theology , where he lived first in the Nikolaihaus and from 1911 in the Canisianum .

On August 24, 1915, Sigismund Waitz ordained him as a priest in Nagyvárad . He was initially an assistant priest in Gyula . On January 4, 1917 he became a military chaplain and worked in Transylvania, then on the Italian front, in Austria and finally in eastern Hungary. From May 12, 1917 he became a prefect and dogmatics teacher in the Nagyvárad seminary.

At the beginning of 1919 he became pastor of Gyula. When Romanian troops occupied the city in May and deported Hungarian officers, Apor traveled to Bucharest and, through intervention with Queen Marie of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, managed to get the prisoners released.

From 1920 he published a monthly magazine called The Catholic Church Correspondent of Gyula .

The Versailles Trianon Peace Treaty made Gyula a border town just a few kilometers from Romania . This led to the impoverishment of the population and a large flow of refugees. Apor helped those in need wherever he could, giving away his money and even his own shoes. He was supported by the Social Mission Society , which ran orphanages, schools and soup kitchens and had 500 active members in Gyula in 1927.

Apor was a member of the county and city council, whose meetings he attended regularly. In 1936 he came into contact with the KALOT (Catholic National Young Farmers' Council) movement, which organized training events for young people. Gyula soon became a center of this movement. On February 25, 1941, Apor became an honorary citizen of Gyula. Apor was the conventual chaplain of the Order of Malta .

bishop

As early as 1936 and 1939 his name was on the list of proposals for the appointment of bishops. On January 21, 1941 he was appointed bishop of Győr. His episcopal ordination took place in Gyula, and on March 2nd he was instituted as bishop in Győr.

As a bishop he also sought personal contact with the faithful and visited all church institutions and orders in his diocese. He invited priests to lunch in the episcopal residence, which was quite unusual for the time.

He also promoted the ecclesiastical lay organizations. In 1943 he became vice president of the Catholic People's Alliance , which was a meeting place for conservative Catholic politicians. Apor began to reorganize the alliance. Internal political disputes prevented this project.

Through personal contacts he got to know the difficulties of small farmers. He wanted to lease church property to farmers and submitted this proposal to the alliance. Conservative clerics and large landowners fiercely opposed this plan and even Primate Serédi said that Apor had gone too far with his proposals.

Protests against the persecution of the Jews

For revisionist reasons, Miklós Horthy had increasingly joined National Socialist Germany since the 1930s . In 1939 the Hungarian government passed anti-Jewish laws, which also affected baptized Jews. To protect them, the Association of the Holy Cross was founded. From May 1942 Apor was the patron of this association, which he also supported financially. In January 1942, the association wrote a memorandum to Prime Minister Miklós Kállay , in which he called for the baptized Jews to be exempted from anti-Jewish laws. The interventions made it possible to set up a separate Christian-Jewish office for baptized Jews.

Bishop Apor protested that Jews had to wear the yellow Star of David and wrote a protest letter to Interior Minister Andor Jaross when a ghetto was established in Győr in 1943 . He also protested - albeit unsuccessfully - at the German headquarters when the deportation of the Jews to the extermination camps began.

In May 1944, the Hungarian primate, Cardinal Serédi, found out about the events in the Auschwitz concentration camp through a smuggled report and drafted a pastoral letter on this subject and informed the other bishops about Auschwitz. Bishop Laszlo Ravasz and the General Secretary of the Association of the Holy Cross, Jozsef Cavallier, prompted Apor to write a letter to Cardinal Serédi, in which he asked the Primate to agree to a joint protest with the Protestant Church. At the bishops' conference on May 17, 1944, Serédi rejected the protest because it would have little success and repression by the government could be expected.

The situation of the Jews in Hungary worsened when German troops occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944 and forced Döme Sztójay to be appointed head of government.

On June 15, 1944, Apor wrote another letter to the Primate and supported a Catholic-Protestant protest against the treatment of the Jews. Since other bishops supported this action and the Holy See exerted pressure, the Primate agreed to the pastoral letter drawn up by Bishop Apor, dated June 29, 1944. The government intervened with Primate Serédi and wanted to prevent the pastoral letter from being spread because it feared retaliation by the Germans. A compromise was reached: Prime Minister Sztójay wanted to lobby the Germans to stop the deportations of Jews from Budapest. In return, the pastoral letter was not distributed any further. Bishop Apor disagreed because the government's concessions were too vague. He also suggested that a memorandum be sent to the Prime Minister, recommending that a pastoral letter be drawn up highlighting the non-Christian nature of racial discrimination. At the bishops' conference in autumn 1944 Primate Serédi could not persuade the other bishops to agree to a letter of protest. Only Bishop Apor protested against the discrimination against Jews.

honors and awards

  • Honorary citizen of Gyula in 1941
  • Honorary Citizen of Győr (October 23, 1991, posthumously)

Entry of the Red Army

When Horthy announced an armistice with the Soviet Union on October 15 after the Red Army marched into eastern Hungary , he had to resign and a National Socialist government led by Arrow Cross Ferenc Szálasi came to power. Bishop Mindszenty drafted a memorandum on October 31, in which he appealed to the government "not to allow western Hungary to become a venue for retreat battles". Bishop Apor, the Bishop of Székesfehérvár , Lajos Shvoy, and the Archabbot of Pannonhalma , Chrysostomus Kelemen, also signed. Other bishops could not be reached, two bishops refused to sign. Bishop Mindszenty, who delivered the memorandum in Budapest, was therefore arrested on November 26th and imprisoned in Sopronkőhida . As a result of the intervention of Bishop Apor, Bishops Mindszenty, Shvoy and other prisoners were held in a convent in Sopron from December 31st .

On March 28, 1945, the Soviet troops reached the city of Győr. Many persecuted people and refugees, especially women and children, found refuge in the episcopal residence. When Soviet soldiers tried to break into the basement of the bishopric on March 30th to kidnap the women, Bishop Apor and his nephew Sándor Pálffy opposed them and were shot. Apor died on April 2, 1945 as a result of the injuries.

On April 4th he was buried in the Carmelite Church because the Győr Cathedral was partially destroyed. A later transfer to the Ladislaus Chapel of the cathedral was initially prevented by the communist government and only allowed in 1986.

Vilmos Apor was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Rome on November 9, 1997 . His feast day is May 23rd .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Baron Apor † .. In:  Volksblatt für Stadt und Land. Illustrierte Wochen-Rundschau , August 25, 1898, p. 2 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / vbl
  2. ↑ The Beatification of Bishop Vilmos Apor.
  3. ↑ Milán Csikós: Apor Vilmos munkássága Gyulai települési értéktár, Jan. 16, 2019
  4. ↑ Boldog Apor Vilmos vértanú püspökre emlékeztek Győrben May 23 2015 KDNP
  5. ↑ Ünnepségek országszerte - MTI / Magyar Nemzet October 24, 1991. p. 5.
predecessor Office successor
István Breyer Bishop of Győr
1941–1945 		Kálmán cardboard
personal data
SURNAME Apor, Vilmos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bishop of the Diocese of Győr and Blessed of the Catholic Church
DATE OF BIRTH February 29, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Segesvár , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH April 2, 1945
Place of death Győr , Hungary