4 thoughts on “Blue Franciscans”

1. Buildings built so very long ago have such stunning architecture. The spire of this church is so lovely and ornate. Thanks for sharing it.

2. Nice view, interresting architecture of that period.
   Waiting to see how it is inside.

3. I attended Sunday mass in this church ever since I was a young boy. In 1948, at the age of 17, shortly after the communist clamp-down in Hungary, my cousin was in his last year at the Pazmany Peter University law school and I was still in middle school.

   He and I went to the University building late one evening a few blocks away from the Franciscan church. Loudspeakers blasted communist propaganda and Soviet music. The two of us had pliers, one by one we cut the wires to the loudspeakers until the building was silent.

   We then proceeded into the classrooms. In each clasroom there was a communist “altar” — a table covered with red textile, adorned by pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and some Hungarian communist “dignitaries.” We turned the tables upside down and smashed the pictures. We already cleaned up the fourth or fifth classroom when the door opened and a young communist (blue cap decorated with hammer and sickle” named my cousin and said that he caught him. He did not name me because I was not yet a student at the University, the young communist did not know who I was.

   We ran down the marble stairs of the University building, onto to the street. My cousin ran after a bus and jumped on it, I missed the bus, so I was running away in the direction of the Franciscan Church. I rang the bell on the side door: a Franciscan friar opened the door and inquired what I wanted late at night. I told him that I was certain that I would be arrested; my cousin has been identified, I was certain that the secret police would beat my name out of him, therefore I wanted to confess and take communion, then go home and wait for the secret police to arrest me. The friar let me in, I confessed my sins and took communion. It was midnight by then.

   My cousin was arrested by the secret police a few hours later at his home. They beat him and tortured him, but he did not tell them who I was. I am eternally grateful to him for that and to the Franciscan friar who comforted my soul, risking his freedom, too.

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