By: Gašper Blažič
You have probably often come across the claim that the Slovenian Constitution mandates the separation of Church and State. But when you actually start reading the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia, you quickly realise that such a separation is nowhere to be found.
The closest provision is Article 7, which mentions the separation of religious communities from the state, while at the same time stipulating that religious communities are free and equal in their activities. Since all clauses of one and the same article must be considered in full and not torn out of context, we can say that the text of the Constitution, adopted a year after the plebiscite, defines the religious neutrality of state institutions, while religious communities face no special restrictions, nor is there any special law on any religious community, which is a condition for their equality. This does not exclude the possibility of agreements between the state and individual religious communities on certain open questions where general law is insufficient, because the issue is specific. Of course, on the condition that such an agreement does not elevate the internal law of a religious community to the level of general law – for example, applying canon law or sharia law at the state level.
It is worth asking why this provision was included in the modern Slovenian Constitution at all, if even one of its founding fathers, Dr France Bučar, considered it a long‑outdated historical anachronism. After all, the modern state is based on the separation of civil society from state institutions, and religious communities are naturally part of civil society, while the concept of a secular state has been part of Europe’s political heritage since the Enlightenment. We know that even some more developed countries, such as Great Britain and the Scandinavian states, have their own “state” Churches, and, to the dismay of our culture‑war agitators, none of these is the Catholic Church. Likewise, many countries in Eastern Europe have their national Orthodox Churches and are therefore still somewhat inclined toward so‑called caesaropapism. Some may raise an eyebrow and ask whether, before the Second World War, we did not also have clerics in politics, from Janez Evangelist Krek to Anton Korošec. True, but we even had such a case in socialism, which strictly emphasised the separation of Church and State, yet still had not only a priest but even a bishop among the delegates of the Assembly. I am thinking, of course, of Dr Vekoslav Grmič.
The indoctrination of the majority of the public with the anachronisms against which Dr Bučar warned is also the reason why this public instinctively reacts whenever a bishop comments on social conditions (and let us admit, such cases are now very rare). Much of this stems from the Yugoslav legacy of understanding religion, where religious freedom was conceived primarily as the right to non‑belief, that is, as a negative attitude toward religious institutions. Yet these belong to the so‑called intermediary institutions, those that mediate between the individual and the wider society. This theory was well developed by the Slovenian‑Austrian‑American sociologist Thomas (Tomaž) Luckmann, with whom I conducted an interview for Demokracija in 2008 during the Pučnik Symposium.
It is interesting how the mood regarding the “absolute” separation of Church and State quickly changes when the subject turns to taxation. Suddenly the Catholic Church is supposed to register as a profit‑making enterprise, because it allegedly charges for Mass intentions which, horror of horrors, are untaxed! And even the communist regime did not dare to tax them, though it often reached for the money people voluntarily gave for Masses. Even more so for donations from abroad, since these were mostly in hard currencies (German marks) compared to the unstable Yugoslav dinar. And perhaps this is the reason why the modern heirs of the red revolution never accepted the principle inherited from the German liberal tradition: “a free Church in a free State.” They want to keep it under control.