The retired primate of Hungary, Cardinal Laszlo Paskai, died Aug. 17, in Vatican City, at the age of 88. He led the Catholic Church in Hungary as the country moved from communism to democracy at the end of the 1980s.

Blessed Paul VI made him a bishop in 1978, naming him apostolic administrator of Veszprem. A year later he became bishop of the diocese. In 1982, St. John Paul II named him coadjutor of the Archdiocese of Kalocsa.

The pope named him archbishop of the primatial see of Esztergom-Budapest in 1987 and made in a cardinal the following year.

He retired in 2002.