rehabilitated 55 long years after becoming a victim of a Communist show trial, the country’s oldest lawyer said in reports monitored by BosNewsLife learned Thursday, June 24.
Gyorgy Schirilla, 95, told reporters he had won an appeal against a verdict handed down in 1949 when Communists send his client, Priest Miklos Nagy, to three years imprisonment for allegedly mishandling church funds.
Nagy was accused of failing to place $24,000 and 20,000 Swiss francs of church money in a bank account, although foreign currency accounts were frozen by the Communist regime.
ACQUITTED
"I’m happy — it was worth it, after all," Schirilla was quoted as saying by the Reuters
news agency, after the Hungarian Supreme Court upheld his appeal and acquitted his client, 31 years after his death.
The trial was part of a campaign by Hungary’s Communist rulers against the Catholic Church and the outspoken Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, who was persecuted under and only rehabilitated after the collapse of Communism in 1989.
Nagy recalled that his jailed client told him that “the biggest pain was not that they broke nine of my fingers, but that they expelled me to serve (as a priest) in the smallest village of the country."
CHURCH BELL
Schrilla said he had told the court that “as he rang the bell with his own hands for only two souls to hear it there (in that small village church), I’m ringing the bell for his soul now — these were my last words at the trial."
Lawyer Schirilla said Nagy was also a gifted poet, whose work was translated into 17 languages, Reuters reported.
Schirilla also defended Hungarians tried and jailed after Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 uprising. After the trials he was reportedly expelled from the chamber of registered solicitors and reinstated only after the fall of communism in 1990.
