On this date in 1953, Istvan Sandor was hanged in Communist Hungary

Sandor was a printer noted as a mentor to younger Catholics — including the orphanage that shared his print-shop’s building.

When his Salesian order was suppressed in 1950, Sandor had to continue this work underground, practically inviting martyrdom. At one point his superiors in the order urged him to flee Hungary; Sandor stubbornly stuck around under an alias.

This shadow existence was bound to be a fleeting one. The Hungarian secret police kept close tabs on him, and when it found that he was in contact with a guard close to the party leadership, it made a national security case out of the affair — arresting nine of its own spooks, five priests, and several civilians.

In a secret military trial, Sandor and three others were condemned to death by hanging for plotting against the state. One of those sentences was modified to life imprisonment, but the other three hanged on June 8th. Their families only got definitive word of their fate in 1955.

Sandor was officially rehabilitated by the post-Communist government in 1994. In 2013, Pope Francis beatified him.

“We celebrate in him the hero who was true to his calling as a Salesian brother, even at the cost of his life,” Cardinal Peter Erdo said at a mass on that occasion. “We respect in him the exceptional labourer who taught youth the love of work. We stand deeply moved before the victim of a show trial who was tortured, sentenced to death and executed based on false testimony.”

On this day..

• 1967: The USS Liberty attack ... after executions in El Arish?
• 1627: Catlyn Fiermoing, village witch
• 1639: The Duke of Valette, in effigy
• 1658: John Hewett and Henry Slingsby, royalists
• 1743: John Breads, Rye killer
• 1989: Stefan Svitek, the last in Czechoslovakia
• 1866: Anton Probst, "I only wanted the money"
• 1693: Elizabeth Emerson
• 1675: The murderers of John Sassamon, precipitating King Philip's War
• 1896: Bill Gay, prospector
• 1405: Richard le Scrope and Thomas de Mowbray, without color of law
• 1934: Three inept murderers (with a fourth to come)