By: Blagovest.si
On Thursday, January 20th, 2022, 70 years have passed since the burning of the then Bishop of Ljubljana, Msgr. Anton Vovk in Novo mesto. He was poured with petrol and set on fire by order of the Communist Party and the State Security Administration (UDV).
On this occasion, the Archbishop of Ljubljana, Metropolitan and President of the SŠK, Msgr. Stanislav Zore donated a Holy Mass for persecuted Christians at 6.30 pm in the Ljubljana Cathedral.
The burning of Archbishop Anton Vovk: an example of state Christianophobia
Anton Vovk was born on May 19th, 1900, in Vrba na Gorenjskem in the same room as his great-grandfather France Prešeren. He completed elementary school in Breznica and Kranj, where he also attended the first six years of high school. He was ordained a priest on June 29th, 1923. For the first three years, he served as chaplain in Metlika. From 1926 he was the first chaplain and then from 1928 pastor in Tržič.
A year before the start of the war, on April 15th, 1940, he was appointed, and on September 2nd, 1940, he was placed as cathedral canon in Ljubljana. On June 15th, 1945, Anton Vovk took over the leadership of the Diocese of Ljubljana, and thus, in those extremely wild times, he became Vicar General and “Poor General” for the Church, as he wrote.
He was ordained a bishop on December 1st, 1946, in Ljubljana. He chose the words In Domino confido as his episcopal motto. In addition to the diocese of Ljubljana, he was entrusted with the apostolic administration of the Slovene part of the Rijeka diocese (from 1951 to 1961) and the apostolic administration of the Slovene part of the Trieste-Koper diocese (from 1951 to 1955) due to the new interstate division.