crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
is a thing that was valid 500 years ago, but today it is a stupidity /…/” 30 A logical consequence of this
view was not only repression of religion but also prosecution of the Catholic Church and other religious
communities and their believers. The Communist regime paid the greatest attention to the Catholic
Church (hereinafter: Church). Because it was by far the most numerous and most influential among all
the religious communities in Slovenia and because the Communist authorities could never subject it to
their rule, they considered it “interior enemy number one” until the fall of their power.
The period of the worst persecution of the Church in Slovenia was the period from the end of the
war until the beginning of the ‘50s. In this period, the authorities deprived the Church of the major part of
its property via agrarian reform and confiscations, while simultaneously exercising severe pressure on the
clergy. The political secret police – State Security Administration – had an important role in the persecution
of the clergy. The Communist Party also involved judicial bodies in the implementation of repression of the
Church and clergy. After the war, political and show trials against priests and monks followed one after the
other before military and civil jurisdiction courts. There they were issued sentences of deprivation of liberty
with forced labour, confiscation of property and deprivation of political rights, while a few priests were even
sentenced to death and executed. Many priests were imprisoned without ever having been sentenced. In the
first post-war decades, almost every other priest in Slovenia spent at least one day in prison and some of them
were even imprisoned several times. 31 According to the Commission for Religious Issues in 1955, 319 priests
were convicted in Slovenia in the period from 1945 until 1995; they were mostly sentenced to imprisonment,
but four death penalties were issued as well. 32 A great number of priests were also punished after the war by
the administrative authorities for internal affairs. In the period from 1945–55, 1,033 priests were punished in
Slovenia, of these 969 with fines and the rest with imprisonment. 33 The administrative authorities for internal
affairs (Commission for Offences) most frequently sent the priests to be “re-educated” in the camps for
socially beneficial labour. Despite partial normalisation of relations between the state and the Church, priests
continued to be persecuted after 1966. In 1966, 1967 and 1968, there were 14 priests involved in criminal
proceedings and 121 priests in administrative proceedings. 34
Particularly in the first post-war years, the Communist authorities left the priests to be persecuted by
the most fanatical activists, who were free to intimidate them and even physically attack them. There were
cases when such party activists simply expelled the priests and forbade them to return to their parish. In
some cases, for example in Medvode and Bizeljsko, such persecution ended with the murder of a priest.
One such deed of these extremists was the attempted murder of the Ljubljana assistant Bishop, Anton
Vovk, who was drenched with gasoline and set on fire on a train in the railway station in Novo Mesto on
20 January 1952, and barely survived the severe burns. These extremists desecrated and destroyed sacral
buildings (chapels, crosses and churches) without being liable for their deeds and without being punished.
The persecution authorities usually deliberately looked the other way in these cases.
In parallel with these repressive measures against the clergy, the Communist regime also carried out
repression against believers. Teachers and professors of religious belief were particularly threatened – they
were asked to abandon their world-view or leave the teaching profession. 35 Many of them lost their jobs
because of their religious beliefs. However, even more students were expelled from school on the grounds
of their religious belief. The victims of these sanctions were for the most part students at teachers’ colleges.
In the teachers’ college in Maribor, the teaching staff took under scrutiny thirty students for their “political
inappropriateness” in February 1952 and expelled two of them from all schools, expelled one female student
from the teachers’ college and advised the rest of them to leave the college on a voluntary basis. 36
Under Communist rule, not only were the Church, priests and believers persecuted, but also
and even more so, other churches or religious communities. Among the most persecuted were Jehovah’s
Witnesses (“jéhovci”). They were persecuted even in the eighties, mostly because they refused to bear
arms and did not want to participate in military service in accordance with their religious beliefs.
30
Historical Archives of Celje, Local Committee of the Slovenian League of Communists of Celje, box 1, sign. of the archive unit: 2.
31
“Roter’s interrogators”, Family (Družina, a magazine), 19 October 2003, interview with Dr Tamara Griesser Pečar, p. 8.
32
Mateja Režek, “The issue of religion is the issue of liberating the Church from the Vatican. Relations between the State and the Catholic
Church in the period 1949–1953”, Historical Paper (Zgodovinski časopis), 3 (1999), p. 375.
33
Ibid.
34
Lovro Šturm, Ljuba Dornik Šubelj, Pavle Čelik, “Instructions for the work of security bodies in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia”,
Sources 21, Ljubljana 2003, document 2.8, p. 132.
35
More about it: Religion, Church and School in the documents of municipal committees of the Slovenian League of Communists of the
Historical Archives of Celje, Milko Mikola (ed.), Celje 2003. The publication was published by the author with the support of Mohorjeva
družba, Celje.
36
Janez Pastar, “Year 1952 at the Maribor Teachers’ College”, in: 130 Years, Anthology of III. Gymnasium Maribor, Maribor 1993, pp.
12–69.
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