Vilmos Apor

Vilmos Apor (Baron Vilmos Apor de Altorja) was born on 29 February 1892 in Segesvár in Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary and now Sighișoara in Romania. He came from the Hungarian Catholic nobility; the Apor family of Altorja was an old Transylvanian house. He received a Jesuit secondary education at Kalksburg near Vienna and prepared for the priesthood with theological studies that included the Jesuit faculty at Innsbruck. He was ordained a priest on 24 August 1915. The First World War was then underway, and in the early years of his priesthood he combined ordinary pastoral work with service as a military chaplain.

After the collapse of Austria-Hungary his priestly life was centered on Gyula, on the Hungarian Great Plain. For many years he served there as a curate and then as parish priest. He gained a reputation for personal simplicity, energetic organization of parish life, care for workers and the poor, and attention to Catholic education and youth. Contemporaries described him as approachable rather than courtly, despite his baronial rank. That long pastoral apprenticeship in a single town shaped the practical, protective style of leadership he later showed as a bishop.

In early 1941 Pope Pius XII appointed him Bishop of Győr; he was consecrated in February of that year. He entered his diocese while Hungary was allied with the Axis and while anti-Jewish legislation and, later, German occupation and deportations placed Hungarian Jews in extreme danger. As bishop he preached and wrote against racial persecution, sought to intervene on behalf of Jews, and offered shelter. He also criticized the moral collapse that accompanied war, occupation, and the Arrow Cross regime. His episcopate lasted only about four years, but it coincided with the gravest crisis of twentieth-century Hungary.

When the Red Army took Győr in March 1945, large numbers of civilians, especially women and girls, hid in the cellars of the bishop’s residence. On 28 March 1945 Soviet soldiers attempted to drag women out. Bishop Apor refused to yield them, stood in defense of those who had claimed sanctuary, and was shot. He suffered for several days and died of his wounds on 2 April 1945. Catholic memory treated his death as martyrdom incurred in the protection of the innocent, particularly of women threatened with sexual violence.

Pope John Paul II beatified him on 9 November 1997 in Saint Peter’s Square. Blessed Vilmos Apor is buried in the cathedral of Győr. His liturgical memorial is kept on 23 May. He has not been canonized. In Hungarian and wider Catholic remembrance he stands as a bishop of the Second World War generation who died blocking the door against armed men so that those under his roof might not be seized.