Cardinal Mindszenty Gets Wish--Burial in Hungary : Religion: Originally interred in Austria, he wanted to come home when ‘the red star of faithless Moscow’ fell.

ESZTERGOM, Hungary —  On a day as dreary as the funeral dirges that droned from Esztergom’s hilltop cathedral, Hungarians and Roman Catholic pilgrims Saturday laid to rest the remains of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty and the legacy of guilt borne by those whose compromise abandoned him to a foreign grave.

More than 50,000 of the faithful attended an open-air funeral Mass on the soggy cathedral lawns overlooking the Danube River to rebury an unflinching fighter for religious freedom.

It was a day to remember Hungary’s primate, who died in exile in 1975, deflated by an unwanted deal for his liberty after decades of struggling to release Hungarians from atheist repression.

But even 16 years after his death, Mindszenty stirs complex emotions in his homeland, where he tirelessly battled the evil of totalitarianism while church and Communist leaders found accommodation.

His steadfast resistance to communism earned him a life of misery in the postwar era and virtual obscurity among the people whose freedom to worship he sought to protect. But Mindszenty, who came to symbolize moral conviction, is now seen as the one true warrior in the good fight.

“Today his body, as already his spirit, makes solemn entry into his fatherland, no longer as the vanquished but as victor,” papal legate Opilio Rossi declared in his sermon, gesturing to the cardinal’s brass-trimmed casket brought home a day earlier from Austria.

Born of peasant stock in western Hungary in 1892, Mindszenty suffered his first internment only four years after being ordained, during the short-lived Communist revolution of 1919. He defied fascist authorities during World War II by defending Hungarian Jews, then stood up for the rights of embattled minorities until the fight of his life emerged in the late 1940s.

Mindszenty’s ardent opposition to communism led to trumped-up charges of treason and conviction in a show trial, after which he was condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison.

A sympathetic guard set him free during the 1956 anti-Communist uprising, and Mindszenty delivered an impassioned address to his congregation via radio the night before Soviet troops and tanks arrived to crush the democratic revolt.

The cardinal then sought refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, where he lived for 15 years.

But the Cold War victim’s plight became a political discomfort during the days of detente.

Against his will, the cardinal was spirited from Hungary in 1971, under an East-West agreement endorsed by the Vatican.

“That was the heaviest cross of my life,” Mindszenty wrote in his memoirs, lamenting but adhering to the papal order to abandon his flock.

Mindszenty, who died four years later in Vienna, was entombed at the St. Laszlo Church in Mariazell, Austria. In his last will and testament, he expressed the wish that he be returned to his native Hungary when “the red star of faithless Moscow” had fallen.

The anti-Communist revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 paved the way for Mindszenty’s return. Some argue that it was moral guidance from Mindszenty that kept alive dreams of freedom through the years of repression.

Mindszenty’s example to Hungarians now free to exercise their faith was a recurring theme in the eulogies as his remains were laid to their final rest at the 19th-Century, neo-classical cathedral north of Budapest, which is the seat of the Hungarian Catholic church.

“A courageous and outspoken person--not only by reason of his difference from the others but also because he raises a guilty conscience in the opportunists--can be irritating to the average man who is ready to conform,” observed Otto von Hapsburg, who would have been heir to the Hungarian throne under the monarchy that collapsed after World War I.

“He dared to say no to the tyranny of both Hitler and the Communists,” Hapsburg said, describing the late primate as “a giant of the Hungarian people.”

Many of the pilgrims, who traveled from throughout Europe to pay their respects, praised Mindszenty’s unshakable faith for the guidance it provided in the long fight for freedom to worship.

“It’s not right that he was taken away. He should have been allowed to stay in Hungary,” Laszlo Megyessy, a 66-year-old retired engineer in the crowd, said after quiet reflection on Mindszenty’s return. “Westerners were tired of the whole struggle at the time. They wanted a kind of compromise with the Communist countries. But the whole change of the system is the triumph of Mindszenty.”

Prime Minister Jozsef Antall lauded the cardinal’s posthumous return to his congregation as Hungary’s ceremonial rebirth “after half a century of foreign oppression and dictatorship.”

“The rebirth of the country is at the same time commemoration of those who had sacrificed their lives in the past decades for independence and for the national renewal of Hungary,” Antall said. “May the ashes and the coffin of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty give strength to this change and this renewal.”

Through his legate, Pope John Paul II praised the late cardinal as “that outstanding man of God.” The Pope is to visit Hungary in mid-August, and many Catholics believe that he will bring word then of sainthood for Mindszenty.