Shortly before midnight on the evening of December 14, 1957, there was a knock on the door of the parish house of the village of Rábakethely in far western Hungary, just shy of the Austrian border. With the parish priest away, the young curate answered the call to find a teenage boy. He pleaded that his uncle in the neighbouring hamlet of Zsida was gravely ill and likely to die soon. Could the priest come at once?
For a young priest already known for his zeal for souls, there could only be one answer. Fr János gathered the Blessed Sacrament and the holy oils and set off on foot through the winter darkness intending to deliver the Last Rites to a dying soul. Such night calls are ordinary events in the life of a priest, but the events that followed that evening led to Fr Brenner becoming one of the most famous names among Hungary’s Catholic majority. To understand why, we must leave the young curate on that woodland path for now.
