In the 1920s it received a night-time decorative lighting and a heating system, but no changes were made to the building. In 1938 the church was turned into a museum. During the Allied Siege of Budapest of 1944 several bombs hit the building: cracks appeared on the tower; the northwest corner of the floor collapsed; the roof of its long house, the walls of the sanctuary and the chapels were almost completely collapsed. However, the real destruction of the Church of Mary Magdalene was not by the war but the "restoration" of the 1950s: in vain in 1946 Kálmán Lux made the plan to restore the church, in vain the rebuilding of the roof and the shrine began in 1950, and the church building was demolished at the personal request of Mátyás Rákosi, an anti-church communist regime. Only its bell tower and the side chapels escaped from the destruction, thanks to József Csemegi for its rescue as a Rákosi pantheon.