Depoliticisation of religious interest? The league of communists of Slovenia and the ambiguities of its religious policy during the final decades of Yugoslavia

The fact that progressive theologians and Marxist-humanist sociologists of religion had publicly displayed a significant level of mutual understanding and reached notably similar conclusions regarding Church-state relations by the early 1990s cannot obfuscate the controversies within the sphere of societal life in Yugoslavia that remained least affected by the principles of socialist self-management democracy. On the surface, the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state authorities in Slovenia, the northernmost and predominantly Catholic republic of Yugoslavia, appeared fairly peaceful and cooperative throughout the late socialist period. Furthermore, as this paper illustrates, Slovenian religious policy was proposed as a sophisticated model for the inclusive life of believers in a modern socialist society and presented to Vatican diplomats, international experts, and foreign journalists. Nonetheless, during that period, the more independent intellectuals, Catholic and Marxist alike, who warned that the Slovenian Catholic Church was departing from the course of the Second Vatican Council and that the Communist Party should abandon its orthodox Marxist-Leninist understanding of religion to foster genuine dialogue, were marginalised. Instead, there were lengthy debates focusing on whether certain social activities of the Catholic Church encroached on the domain designated for initiatives of the League of Communists and the Socialist Alliance of Working People. With a mounting crisis and increasing public pressure, some public religious manifestations were allowed in the second half of the 1980s, but the fundamental problems remained unaddressed. Although the liberalization of public discourse in Yugoslavia’s final years brought to the fore issues such as freedom of religion and freedom from religion ‒ both of which were integral to the contested programme of the ruling Communist Party and the type of socialist secular society the Slovenian reformed Communists sought to establish ‒, there was not enough time to rework the entrenched religious policy that had alienated many religious citizens.