Slovenia" "
“How Catholic is Slovenia?”. According to the local Episcopal Conference, it is a question to which it is difficult to give a clear answer, in the light of two recent surveys on the matter: one by the Statistics Institute of the Slovenian Republic, the other based on annual parish data. 58% of the Slovenian population (against 72% in the previous survey) declare themselves Catholic; persons of “indeterminate” religion have risen from 7% to 16%, while 10% of Slovenes say they are “nonbelievers” and 23% do not declare any religion at all. These are the findings of the Statistics Institute of the Republic of Slovenia, published before Easter. Another finding is also the growth in the number of Moslems in the country, rising from 1.5% to 2.4%. Quite a different picture is painted, on the other hand, by the annual statistics of the parishes, from which it emerges that over 80% of the children born in Slovenia are baptized in the Catholic Church (same percentage for the dead buried with the Catholic rite), over 60% have been confirmed and some 20% of Catholics regularly attend Mass each Sunday (but the percentage is far higher at Easter and Christmas). Over the last ten years, these data “have not substantially changed”. Different degrees of “belonging”. A comparison between the two surveys comments Janez Grill, spokesman of the Slovene Episcopal Conference shows that “the number of persons who declare themselves Catholic” has dropped, but not the effective number of Catholics in Slovenia. “The high percentage of ‘indeterminate’ persons, including many Catholics Grill continues shows that many are not conscious of belonging to the Catholic Church”. Hence the need for the local church community, to “find ways of bringing back the average contemporary Slovene to the Catholic faith”. This is a delicate question, both for parents who helplessly watch their children live in a different way than the one they transmitted to them, and for priests for whom bringing the young and young families into Church and into the parish is far more difficult than it was in the past”. “Mirror” of society. The data on religion are also, in the view of the Slovene Episcopal Conference, a “mirror of the conditions of a tolerant society”, in which “the anticlerical attitude” is evident in a “large majority of the media and among part of Slovene politicians”. The “anti-clerical atmosphere” thus fomented inevitably influences people’s conduct and ways of thinking”. “Contemporary liberal politics says the press release is not interested in the national, religious and cultural identity of citizens; and with Slovenia’s entry into the European Union and into NATO this underestimation of the national identity may prove fatal”. The Slovene Church, moreover, is quite aware that “a large part of Catholics have a superficial faith, devoid of any real sense of attachment to the Catholic communion and to the rich spiritual tradition of Christianity in Slovenia”. In spite of everything, however, Slovene Catholics are “faithful” and deeply “feel the desire and the need for spirituality on some occasions”, as shown this year by the churches packed at Easter, a sign “not of mere habit”, but of “a profound desire for redemption”. So the Slovene Church can be described as “lively”, its members ranging “from the most fervent and active believers” to “marginal Christians, who are only partially, and more often than not only culturally, linked to the faith”. It’s a Church made up of “remote villages, cities, convents, monasteries but also ‘key presences’ in politics, culture and public life”.
