Slovenia

Slovenia presents one of the sharpest gaps in Europe between affiliation and practice. A substantial share of the population records itself as Catholic; regular attendance is among the lowest in Catholic Europe, and the number declining to state any religion has grown steadily.

The Slovene Reformation left almost no churches and almost no congregations, because the Counter Reformation under the Habsburgs removed both, expelling preachers and burning books. What it left instead is the language. Primoz Trubar, a Protestant preacher working in exile, printed the first two books in Slovene in 1550, a catechism and an abecedarium, and went on to translate the New Testament. Jurij Dalmatin completed a full Slovene Bible in 1584, and Adam Bohoric published the first Slovene grammar the same year. That output is treated as the foundation of the literary language, which is why a Catholic country marks Reformation Day as a public holiday and puts a Protestant preacher on its currency and its stamps.

There is a small continuing Protestant presence in Prekmurje in the northeast, which was under Hungarian rather than Austrian rule and where Lutheranism survived.

The post independence settlement has been contested. Property nationalised under Yugoslavia was returned through a denationalisation process that produced years of litigation and public argument, particularly over forest and land holdings. Religious instruction is excluded from state schools, an arrangement the Catholic Church has challenged and that has held. A financial collapse in the Maribor archdiocese in 2013, arising from speculative investments, led the Vatican to remove its senior clergy and did considerable reputational damage.

Slovenia observes 31 October as Reformation Day, a public holiday, in a country where Protestants are a fraction of one per cent of the population. The reason is that Slovenes date the existence of their written language to the Reformation, and treat the two as one event.

Before 1550 there was no printed Slovene. There were scattered manuscript fragments, the Freising manuscripts among them, and a spoken language with no standard and no literature. Trubar's decision to print in the vernacular for a peasant readership, taken on Protestant principle rather than for literary reasons, created the standard. His famous address to the reader, opening with the words for my dear Slovenes, is the first time the community is named in print in its own language.

What followed within a generation was a full apparatus: Dalmatin's Bible in 1584, printed in Wittenberg because printing was prohibited in the Habsburg lands, and Bohoric's grammar, written in Latin, describing Slovene as a language with rules. The Counter Reformation then destroyed most of the copies. The Bibles survived largely because Catholic priests kept them and used them, there being nothing else in Slovene to preach from, which is a quiet detail that says a good deal about how the two confessions actually related on the ground.

The holiday is therefore not a confessional statement. It is a national one, and the object it commemorates is a book. Slovenia has a second literary holiday in February, Preseren Day, named for its national poet, so the calendar contains two public holidays for writers and none for a king.