„Szabad vallásgyakorlatot biztosít alkotmányunk minden becsületes dolgozónak.”
“Our Constitution Grants Religious Freedom for All Honest Workers”

The Basis and Background of Proposals and Justification of Ecclesiastical Construction Projects between 1957 and 1960

Summary/Abstract: The study examines church building after 1945 in correspondences found in the archive of the State Authority for Religious Affairs, specifically those exchanges that concern constructions and applications for building permission. In order to be successful, the applicants made references and used the language of contemporary political propaganda. Besides appealing to the constitution and freedom of religion, they also often contain references to current events reported in the press at the time. Lantos first places the applications in the context of the legislation and press cited in their text, then goes on to analyse the applicants’ attitudes behind the construction of their argument. The question of how they chose their modes of persuasion is raised by the fact that the correspondence between the authority and the applicants, usually residents of smaller settlements, had its own unique rhetorics, which mirrored contemporary propagandistic utterances almost without exception. Using the journalistic platitudes of contemporary press as argumentation, especially for modern readers, offers an insight into the vulnerability of ordinary people, but also into their ability to adapt to the prevailing modus vivendi. Moreover, the analysis also shows that there have been times and places where propaganda was actually successful and parishioners believed that their building permissions will be granted on the basis of their arguments cited in the applications.

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