In 2009 Hungarian television broadcast a courageous documentary entitled Confessors and Traitors about Hungary’s Catholic Church under Communism. After Mátyás Rákosi seized power in 1945, the Church was subject to fierce persecution. It brought forth confessors and martyrs.

The integrity of faith was kept alive in small pockets of believers, often driven underground, while the institutional Church was gradually brought to heel by an atheist government. Through a mixture of incentives and threats, seminaries and monasteries were infiltrated. Episcopal sees were filled with loyalists reporting to the state. Fear did its work, as did ambition and indolence.