We know from the revelations of the past nearly two decades that some of the men who joined the Roman Catholic priesthood were socially and emotionally maladjusted, and used their position of authority to abuse the most vulnerable in their community.
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There are also today a number of priests, sometimes younger ones, who not only subscribe privately to the most odious examples of political extremism but find ways to infuse their parishes with this insidious material, hoping over time to transform the community to which they are assigned. The story of wartime Hungary’s Father András Kun, a member of the Order of Friars Minor, was an extreme example of how a priest wed to Hungary’s fascists, the Arrow-Cross, engaged in widespread physical and sometimes sexual violence against Hungarian Jews and ultimately engaged in mass murder.
In 1943, Fr. Kun either left the Order of Friars Minor or was expelled; according to the late journalist Rezső Szirmai he was expelled. And it is worth noting that while there is a lack of clarity on whether he ever held faculties as a priest, he gave homilies and occasionally celebrated weddings in Budapest’s Városmajor Heart of Jesus Parish. In 1944, Fr. Kun commanded a death squad unit in Budapest. Wearing a cassock, a Roman collar, a pistol and a crucifix, Fr. Kun personally ordered and oversaw the murder of Jews. In many cases, he instructed his men to have the victims line up on the banks of the Danube and would then give the following command to the firing squad: “In the name of Christ–fire!”
In January 1945, Fr. Kun ordered the torture and murder of Transylvanian Jewish writer Ernő Ligeti and the extermination of his family. Fr. Kun and his death squad brutally tortured Ligeti’s young son too, along with wife. The three of them were taken to Arrow Cross headquarters at Andrássy út 60, interrogated, stripped naked and tied together. Then around midnight, they faced a firing squad, with Ernő Ligeti and his wife killed on the spot, but their son Károly (Charles), surviving four bullets and eventually recovering from his wounds and emigrating from Hungary. (More recommended reading on Ernő Ligeti here.)
Fr. Kun’s rampage continued. Two days after the atrocity committed against the Ligeti family, he and his men attacked the Chevra Kadisha’s hospital in Budapest’s Maros utca, where 92 patients were murdered. Two days following that, Fr. Kun and his Arrow-Cross men stormed a hospital in Városmajor utca, murdering 130 patients and 24 nurses. Amidst their killing spree, Fr. Kun and his Arrow-Cross death squad also robbed their victims of valuables and non-Jews were sometimes victims of their violence too. This is what ultimately led to the original charges brought against Fr. Kun even before the end of World War II.
On 19 September 1945, András Kun awaited his execution by hanging that afternoon after a postwar tribunal found him responsible for at least 500 murders during the Holocaust. Mere hours before he was set to die, Kun participated in an interview with journalist Rezső Szirmai, who went on to speak with 20 convicted Hungarian war criminals and published a book entitled Fasisza lelkek (Fascist Souls) in 1946. Some of the other interviewees included Ferenc Szálasi (1897-1946), leader of Hungary’s Arrow Cross, Andor Jaross (1896-1946) who helped orchestrate the deportation of rural Hungary’s Jews in his position as Minister of Interior and the Nazi collaborationist prime minister Béla Imrédy (1891-1946). This dark collection of interviews lay forgotten for decades, until a second edition was published in 1993.