„Povrat h krščanskemu mišljenju in življenju” Cilji in metode Krekovega krščansko socialnega gibanja
„Return to Christian thought and life”: the objectives and methods of Janez Krek's Christian-social movement

Summary/Abstract: The turn of the twentieth century in Slovenian culture was marked by a movement, later dubbed “political Catholicism.” The cultural and economic narrative which arose from the movement was in the long term of much greater importance than the political objectives of the Catholic movement itself. The aim of this article is to describe the narrative from the point of view of its most prominent representative, Janez Evangelist Krek (1865–1917). Doctor Krek’s conservative social reforms were able to become one of the pillars of the Slovenian collective consciousness solely because they could be bent to conform to the recurring cultural templates used by the Slovenian society to accept and reshape changes since as early as the beginning of nineteenth century. The imagery constituted by these templates is termed domestic in the article. This is to mean that it is based upon pre-modern cultural capital and traditional survival strategies. Doctor Krek’s work is proof of the ease with which domestic imagery “swallowed” modernity and “spat it out” onto the fringe of society, into the sphere of technical developments, which was then used to protect conservative values and institutions. Paradoxically, it was only in this form that the domestic imagery allowed for the relatively easy acceptance of socialism after World War II.

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