ABSTRACT
To explain the complex issue of the Yugoslav wars in the context of religions and violence is a very dicult task. is issue has so many historical, socio-political, religious-theoretical, and cultural grounds that it is nearly impossible to provide a sucient account within this writing. In addition, the Yugoslav wars were also a problem for the Marxist transition of dierent nations with various social and cultural backgrounds. e comprehensiveness of this issue, especially of its spiritual dimension, has to be read as a continuous development of interlaced cultural, political, and religious processes. To deal with the recent Yugoslav crisis means to respect a specic genealogy and a development that is delayed when compared to other European nations. For this reason it is challenging to parallel development in the former Yugoslavia with other European countries. As most of the wars in modern times the First and Second World Wars were huge, cruel, and sad massacres. e Crusaders – an original German Christian religious and spiritual movement, which also had an important role in Slovenia – stressed the necessity of the renewal of Christianity aer the disaster of WWI. Edvard Kocbek the leading gure of the Slovenian Crusaders was a personalist and a friend of Emanuel Mounier (the founder of the revue L’Esprit in October 1932). Kocbek criticized the prevailing Church’s understanding of the War in Spain, which plead for a revolutionary Republic. During the dicult time of WWII, he gathered Slovenian-le Catholics and inspired them toward a revolutionary project, hoping that the communists would become the revolutionary force and the Catholics would become the spiritual force for the necessary transformation of the Slovenian nation. While the revolutionary forces deeply transformed the Slovenian nation, the spiritual transformation has remained in many aspects incomplete.
