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Akron, Pa.
Hungarian Roman Catholic family adopts anabaptist beliefs


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 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 about 200 groups operating throughout the country, involved in community service and writing about nonviolence and peace.

Bokor is one of Mennonite Central Committee’s partners in peace work in the Balkans and other Eastern European countries.

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

Gyula and his wife Agnes have five children. According to their Roman Catholic tradition, they had their first three children baptized as babies. However, by the time their fourth and fifth children were born, their 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, 30 Bokor members, including Gyula, served jail time for refusing to participate in the military.

In 1990, as Hungary became more free, the government 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 www.c3.hu/~bocs/bocs-ang.htm.

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 to England. “We both stated that we had translated Hornus’s book,” Guyla recalled.

Kreider had translated the book into English; Gyula has translated this English-language version into Hungarian.

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.

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

 – Pearl Sensenig, MCC

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Last modified May 26, 2000.

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