Lambert Ehrlich

Lambert Ehrlich was a Carinthian Slovene Roman Catholic priest, ethnologist, and political figure, born in 1878 in the village of Žabnice (Italian: Camporosso in Valcanale; German: Saifnitz) in the Canal Valley of the Duchy of Carinthia, then part of Austria-Hungary. He came from the Slovene-speaking community of that alpine borderland. He received his priestly formation at the seminary in Klagenfurt (Celovec) and was ordained a Latin-rite Catholic priest in the early twentieth century. He continued studies in theology and in the ethnological and comparative study of religion, work that later defined his academic career. His early life and ministry unfolded in the multiethnic Habsburg world, where Slovene national feeling and Catholic identity were closely intertwined.

After the First World War and the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the Canal Valley passed to Italy and the Carinthian question was settled in a way that left a Slovene minority in Austria. Ehrlich moved to Ljubljana in the new South Slav state. In the early 1920s he joined the Faculty of Theology at the University of Ljubljana, where he taught comparative religion and related subjects and became a known Catholic academic. He published on ethnology and the history of religions and took part in the intellectual life of interwar Slovenia, remaining a diocesan priest rather than a member of a religious order.

In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia he stood on the conservative, nationalist wing of Slovene political Catholicism, in the orbit of the Slovene People's Party and of uncompromising Catholic-national circles. He was a determined anti-communist and a critic of liberal secularism and of Marxist movements. He continued to concern himself with Slovenes living outside Yugoslavia, including those in Carinthia and in the Julian March, and he exercised influence through teaching, writing, and networks of clergy and laity rather than through high elected office.

After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Ljubljana and much of central Slovenia were occupied and then annexed by Fascist Italy as the Province of Ljubljana. Ehrlich opposed both the Italian occupation authorities and the communist-led Liberation Front, which claimed exclusive leadership of Slovene resistance. He sought to keep Catholic youth and intellectuals independent of that Front and looked toward a postwar settlement associated with the Western Allies, including through political memoranda on the future of the Slovene lands. The communist security apparatus treated this stance as hostile.

On 26 May 1942 he was shot and killed in Ljubljana by members of the Liberation Front’s security and intelligence service (VOS). The assassination belonged to a wider wartime campaign of liquidations directed at anti-communist Slovene figures, especially Catholic and conservative opponents who would not accept the Front’s monopoly. In later Slovene Catholic and anti-communist memory Ehrlich has been honoured as a priest and patriot murdered for his convictions. He has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church and is not the object of an official liturgical cult.