The atheist Communist parties that seized power across Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War regarded the Church as a serious rival that had to be crushed. Regimes from Poland to Albania stripped the Catholic Church of its property, closed down religious orders, expropriated schools, banned newspapers, launched vicious propaganda campaigns and targeted its clergymen. The most prominent Catholic clergyman to be imprisoned in this period was Cardinal József Mindszenty, head of the Church in Hungary from 1945, who was arrested at Christmas 1948, tortured, convicted in a show trial and only released during the 1956 revolution. This volume, consisting of competently translated contributions from a conference held in Budapest in 2019 on Communist-era persecutions of church leaders, is of varying quality. For example, the introduction is frustratingly short (scarcely over three pages) while a short piece on initial British diplomatic assessments of Mindszenty (‘more tact and judgement’ needed) offers scant analysis. Nevertheless, there is much in this volume that is valuable, showcasing the work of leading ecclesiastical historians in Hungary, many of whose contributions are grounded in serious archival research. For example, Máté Gárdonyi provides a solid overview of the Hungarian Catholic bishops’ attempts to warn their flock about the threat posed by the Bolshevisation of the country, Géza Vörös is fascinating on the cat-and-mouse game played by the Hungarian secret police as they prepared Mindszenty's arrest while Margit Balogh offers a wrenching account of his brutal interrogation and trial that came close to psychologically breaking him. Tibor Zinner makes a lengthy but ultimately persuasive argument that the blame for the persecution of Mindszenty cannot simply be blamed on rogue elements of the secret police but was overseen from start to finish by the entire Communist party leadership, while Frigyes Kahler provides an impassioned account of the trial's deleterious impact on Hungarian Catholicism, exposing the brutality of the Communist regime but also alienating a swathe of the faithful who accepted the state's anticlerical propaganda. Also of value are the series of studies that make up much of the second half of this volume on the parallel persecutions of Catholics in the neighbouring states to Hungary including the fate of Hungarian-speaking Catholics in Czechoslovakia, western Ukraine and Romania as well as the brutal treatment of the heads of the Croatian, Albanian, Czechoslovak and Polish Catholic Churches. In spite of the brutality unleashed on the local Catholic Churches by the post-war Communist takeovers, Catholicism had begun again to flourish even before the Communist dictatorships collapsed across the region in 1989. These remarkable stories of Central European clerics, which are as much about resilience as they are about persecution, provide a critical explanation why.