Anton Strle

Anton Strle was a Slovenian Roman Catholic diocesan priest and theologian whose life ran from the last years of Austria-Hungary through the Yugoslav period and into independent Slovenia. He was born on 21 January 1915 in the village of Osredek pri Krmelju in Lower Carniola, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Formed for the priesthood in the Diocese of Ljubljana, he was ordained during the Second World War, in 1941, and began pastoral work in a Church already under occupation and soon to face a hostile communist state. He remained a secular priest of Ljubljana rather than a member of a religious order, and he lived under the Latin-rite discipline of clerical celibacy.

In the decades after the war he combined pastoral service with academic theology. He taught dogmatic theology at the Faculty of Theology in Ljubljana from the later 1960s into the 1980s, forming priests and students at a time when Catholic intellectual life in Yugoslavia was constrained but not extinguished. He was especially known as a translator, putting into Slovenian a large body of contemporary Catholic theology and conciliar and magisterial texts so that Slovenian clergy and laity could follow the wider Church, including the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. His own writing and lecturing stayed close to classical dogmatic themes and to the pastoral needs of a Church living under political pressure.

Those who knew him described a priest of marked personal austerity, humility, and availability: simple lodgings, little interest in rank or comfort, long hours of prayer, and readiness for confession and spiritual conversation. In a society that marginalized the Church, that combination of scholarly competence and evident holiness made him a point of reference for clergy and faithful. He continued to teach, translate, and offer spiritual guidance into old age.

Strle died in Ljubljana on 20 October 2003. A reputation for holiness attached to his memory, and the Archdiocese of Ljubljana opened a cause for beatification, so that he has been styled a Servant of God. He has not been beatified or canonized and has no universal feast day or official patronages. He is remembered in Slovenia as a model diocesan priest, teacher, and man of prayer rather than as a prelate or founder.