The Serbian Orthodox Church in Slovenia Between the World Wars

With the establishment of the Kingdom of SHS, the Eastern Christianity with its system of the apparent disunity and actual autocephaly of national churches had to face new challenges. The most important of these was how to create a single national church out of six separate “Serbian” churches. This challenge was immediately followed by another one: namely, how to get over the fact that in the new multinational and multi-confessional state, the Orthodox Church was no longer a privileged national church (as it had been in the Kingdom of Serbia or the Kingdom of Montenegro), but only one of the several officially-acknowledged creeds. Although it still maintained close connections with the ruler (who represented a strong leadership, at least while embodied in King Alexander Karađorđević), the Orthodox Church had to come to terms with the new reality and a serious competition of other churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church.