Priest Who Helped Form St. Michael’s Abbey Dies at 82

Norbertine Father Benedict A. Horvath, a Hungarian-born priest who escaped oppression under communism to help establish St. Michael’s Abbey in Portola Hills, has died at age 82 of complications related to pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“He was an old-fashioned parish pastor with the keys and all,” said Father Hugh Barbour, prior of St. Michael’s. “He opened and closed the doors and ran everything.”

Born in Hungary in 1915, Horvath entered the Canons Regular of Premontre in 1934. The order advocated both monastic and apostolic, or active, life by priests, in contrast to the more informal conduct of priests common to the time. After Horvath obtained degrees in French literature and philosophy from the Royal University in Budapest, he joined a parish of the order and taught in schools in Hungary until they were closed by Communist officials in 1948.

He was moved to parish work, where he found success in organizing youth and in preaching to better-educated church members--and came to be seen as a danger to the government.

“They particularly targeted priests who had apostolate with youth or educated people,” Barbour said. “They were considered particularly undesirable. Those were priests who never would have gotten permission to function in a parish or school.”

So Horvath and seven other confreres fled through Austria, also Soviet-occupied, and escaped arrest. He continued working for the order in Europe through the early 1950s, until the Soviets crushed a general strike in Hungary in 1956.

“The fathers, from the time they fled from Hungary, had always had the hope of going back,” Barbour said. “After the uprising of 1956, they saw no hope.”

The next year, the seven remaining Norbertine fathers came to California and established St. Michael’s Abbey of Norbertine Fathers along El Toro Road.

Horvath left the abbey to oversee St. Stephens Church in Los Angeles, returning when he retired in the late 1980s and continuing to celebrate daily Mass with other priests.

He died Sunday at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo. He will be remembered and celebrated at a requiem Mass at 7:30 p.m. Friday at St. Stephens.