By the late 1940s, the last protection left to the Catholic Hungarian minorities were their churches. In 1948, 600 Hungarian Catholic priests and all six of their bishops were arrested in Transylvania. Rome later agreed to gerrymander the Catholic sees and to appoint Romanian bishops to lead the all-Hungarian church, as the Romanians belong to the Eastern Orthodox faith. The fate of the Hungarian Catholics in the other successor states was similar. In 1949, in Ruthenia, the bishop of the 500,000 Catholics was murdered and the parishioners were forced to merge into the Orthodox Chrurch. In Slovakia, in April, 1950, the bishop of 320,000 Catholics was arrested and his parishioners were also forced into the Orthodox Church.

In 1956, 2,700 Hungarians were killed, later 287 were hanged and some 300,000 escaped, yet the Hungarian Freedom Fighters of Budapest still succeeded in mortally wounding the Goliath of Communism. They showed that tanks can not kill ideals and unmasked Soviet brutality. Yet the rulers of the successor states used the uprising as a pretext to speed the forced assimilation of their Hungarian minorities. It was after the Revolution that the remaining autonomous Hungarian regions: Transylvania in Romania and Vojvodina in Yugoslavia were abolished. Today, the more than 3 million Hungarians have no autonomy at all, although it had been guaranteed by the Great Powers in 1920, again in 1946 and once more by the European Parliament in 1993, in Article 11 of Recommendation 1201.

After 1989, there was a short period of hope, when for example the Hungarian bishop, László Tokés, was temporarily heralded as an all-Romanian national hero, for leading the successful revolution against Ceaucescu, or when Miklós Duray, the Hungarian leader of Charter 77, was released from jail in Slovakia. Unfortunately, this did not last. By 1991, the formerly Communist leaders of the successor states (Milosevic in Yugoslavia, Iliescu in Romania, Mechiar in Slovakia) once again started to use nationalistic and anti-Hungarian propaganda to distract public attention from the pressing economic problems of their nations.

Today, two of these three demagogues are gone from the political scene, yet conitions have not changed much and the restoration of cultural autonomy has still not occured. The worst of all tragedies is occuring in Vojvodina, where the Serb refugies from Krajina and Kosovo have ehnically cleansed the native Hungarian population.

One wonders if there is a limit to the patience of this, the largest minority in Europe, and what will happen when that limit is reached?