PROVINCIA
SLOVENIAE
Province of Slovenia
1852 – 1919 – 1926 – 1992
The Province of Slovenia dates back to
1852. That year, the Bishop of Maribor b. Anton Martin Slomsek invited and
welcomed the first Lazarists into his diocese, entrusting them to lead popular
missions and to preach at retreats.
Bishop Slomsek personally led a procession of thirty priests and a large
number of the faithful from the city of Celje to a hill, east of the city, to
the church of St. Joseph, on September 26, 1852. In a liturgical
celebration, the church and a house were given to the Lazarists as their base
and residence.
The
house in Celje can be regarded as the mother house for these four provinces
today: Slovenia, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia. At that time, all these
countries were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After World War I, in 1919, a vice province of Yugoslavia was
created. At that time, the Lazarists had houses in Celje, Ljubljana, Maribor
and Beograd and, soon after, in Macedonia.
Rev.
Janez Francisek Gnidovec, a Lazarist,
was named Bishop of Skopje on Nov. 30, 1924 and died Feb. 3, 1939. The process
for his beatification is in progress. A number of confreres came to help him
in the pastoral work and in education in his diocese.
In 1920, the Mission Mass Association (Misijonska mašna zveza) donated some
property with a house and a farm to the Lazarist fathers, entrusting them
to promote World Missions, with an eye on China. They started with a magazine,
Catholic Missions (Katoliški misijoni), today known as Mission's Horizon
(Misijonska obzorja) to inform and awaken an awareness in people of
their catholic mission to spread the Good News. Soon the Mission in China was
named Baraga’s Mission (Baragov misijon) in honor of a Slovenian missionary in
the Great Lakes Region and first bishop of Marquette, USA. The process for his
beatification is in progress.
In 1926,
the Vice Province became the Province of Yugoslavia and, in 1992, it
was renamed the Province of Slovenia, since Slovenia had become an independent
country two years earlier.
After the Second World War all the property and houses
of the Lazarists were seized by the Communist regime and nationalized and,
thus, their very existence was shattered and the work of the province
destroyed. A number of confreres fled the country. Those remaining were
imprisoned because they were members of a religious congregation and because of
their work in the past, and were thus accused as enemies of the people. The
province went into a kind of limbo and remained as such until 1957 when the
first seminarians (minor seminary) entered the order. The first of these
seminarians was ordained in 1963.
Today the
confreres of the Province of Slovenia are engaged in “ad clery disciplinam” –
teachers at the faculty of theology, popular missions, retreats, Marian Youth,
Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (Vincencijeva zveza dobrote), with the handicapped and sick (Prijatelj),
pastoral work in parishes (in Slovenia, Croatia), pastoral work in diaspora
(Serbia and Macedonia) and among emigrants (Argentina and Canada) and in
missions (Madagascar, Siberia, Bolivia).
Address:
Lazaristi
Maistrova 2
1000
Ljubljana
Slovenia
Tel.:(01)
230-2464, Fax: (01) 230-2474