Old enmities endure
Davis, Robert Murray
significant was the fact that under the Hapsburgs, the church provided the major career opportunities for poor but bright and ambitious Slovene boys. In many parishes, the priest was the only...
...All religious education was banned from schools...
...In 1989, Christmas became an official holiday...
...Americans also continue to de- bate state support of religious education and attempts to limit or end abortion, but at least we have vehicles for that debate and are familiar with its terms...
...Thus far, the church has made little headway on these issues...
...The first government of independent Slovenia promised to return confiscated church property...
...Despite the fact that Archbishop Sustar joined well-known writers and intellectuals in signing what writer Sabrina Petra Ramet considered a right-wing attack on for- mer Communists in government, some regarded him as the "red archbishop...
...Archbishop Rode seems to be far more outspoken than his predecessor...
...About two hundred fifty priests were imprisoned...
...Robert Murray Davis, a frequent contributor, teaches at the Uni- versity of Oklahoma at Norman...
...Nuns were forbidden to work in hospitals--many went to Macedonia and Montenegro--and teachers were forbidden on pain of dismissal to be affiliated with the church...
...Liberals see this as an attempt to limit personal freedom and return to the conditions of 1939, if not 1539...
...The church is also eager for restoration of less material advantages, and this is stated dearly in an official pamphlet: "The church is faced with the task of the restoration of the Spirit and moral values among the Slovene nation...
...Finally, at the end of April, the government gave in...
...In many parishes, the priest was the only person who could have been called an intel- lectual, and thus the church had enormous influence in so- cial and cultural as well as religious matters, a distinction that few people recognized then or, as some liberals insist, even now...
...During Tito's reign, the church contended with severe re- strictions...
...The matter of restoring church property is less ideologi- cally divisive than what to do about education or abortion, but even here progress has been slow...
...For example, Saint Joseph's Church in Ljubljana and its monastery and retreat house had been taken from the Jesuits...
...After Slovenia gained inde- pendence, Archbishop Sustar continued to move with cir- cumspection...
...This is not going to be easy...
...The bishop, in exile, was not replaced, for political reasons obvious to anyone who lived through the cold war...
...We support the freedom of Catholics to choose their parties...
...In any case, Monsignor Francis Petric, author of the potentially alarming sentence quoted above, admits that the church needs to do a better job of explaining that it does not want to go back to the nineteenth, let alone the sixteenth, century...
...Priests had no access to hospitals, prisons, or homes for the aged...
...My source start- ed to say "abortion clinic...
...Christmas was a working day...
...The church had become a film studio...
...Today, many Slovene Catholics would like to recover some of the influence lost in 1945...
...Of course, the hierarchy appears to hope that Catholics will choose the People's Party and the Christian Democrats...
...This is partly a legacy of forty-five years of Communist propaganda, but liberals also point to the statements of Archbishop Rode...
...Both clerics and anticlericals agree that Slovenia's conservatives suffer from the loss of a generation of potential leaders...
...Restoration of church rights and privileges has followed the same incremental pattern...
...In any case, Rode's comments on social issues provoked a severe reaction from liberals and appear to have necessitated some damage con- trol by his subordinates...
...Those losses were signif- icant...
...Not only was its property confiscated, but church publications were suppressed...
...These are still being discovered in Slovenia...
...That coalition fell early in May 2000...
...The government offered to return the church building--the largest in Slovenia--but the Je- suits refused on the ground that they could not carry out their mission without the other buildings...
...For example, in 1986 he was allowed to convey Christmas greetings in the print media, under- scoring the fact that it was not a holiday...
...Some critics even speculated that Rode had lived outside of Slovenia for so long that he may not have had full command of the language...
...Commonweal | 0 August 11, 2000...
...the monastery, the film offices...
...the retreat house, a family-planning office...
...This moderation offended some conservative Catholics...
...It has been succeeded by a conservative coalition friendly to the church, but elections are scheduled for this fall, so no immediate action is expected...
...A year later he re- peated the message on radio, and a year after that on television...
...The archdiocese had no for- mal leadership, and the vicar of Ljubljana had to report nightly to the police...
...Some restoration of property has taken place...
...an- other two hundred fled to the West...
...After Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, conditions improved to some extent and, even more so in 1967, when Tito visited Pope Paul VI and diplomatic relations with the Vatican were restored...
...The government dominated by the Liber- al Democrats refused to do so...
...This history affects the church and the political parties allied to it even now...
...A synod on pastoral work in the new millennium is developing ways to heal divisions among Slovenes...
...He told the journalist Christopher Merrill that "we distinguish between the country's politics and spiritu- al mission" and that "we are not connected to any political parties...
...But Rode knows enough Slovenian to demand that reli- gious instruction be reintroduced into public schools and to speak against abortion...
...Many Catholics, including most lay intellectuals, were executed or went into exile...
...Following Tito's death in 1980, the archbishop of Ljubljana, Alojzij Sustar, gradually began to reclaim the church's prerogatives...
...This charge cannot be made of his successor, Archbish- op Franc Rode, a 1945 6migr6 who served in the Vatican be- fore his 1997 appointment...
...But the forest lands have not been returned, and church spokesmen maintain that the revenue derived from those lands is needed to support in- stitutions, to pay priests, and to renovate and construct church buildings...
Vol. 127 • August 2000 • No. 14
