Description

This rare pamphlet includes a Slovenian translation of a letter by Pope Pius XI of 12 October 1935 to Brazilian Cardinal Sebastião Leme with instructions for young priests and an encouraging note for the Catholic church. The pamphlet was multiplied in the technique of mimeography and the cover was decorated with an image of the St. Peter’s Basilica.

The first Slovenian translation was published in 1936and the second one during the war in 1943. This mimeographed version on a cheap paper was published in July 1946, possibly in a Slovenian DP camp in Austria.

The DP camp near the town Spittal, in Carinthia, Austria, was founded by the British in the summer of 1945. The barracks, built by the German POWs, were meant to house the refugees and exiles from Yugoslavia, mostly from Slovenia. Most of the adult people in the camp were escaping the newly founded Yugoslavia as political or religious refugees or as WWII collaborators avoiding the prison or death penalty in their homeland. In the next years they were moved overseas, mainly to Argentina, and also to Canada, United States and other countries.

There were about 5000 persons living in the camp, among them approximately 800 school children.

The brochure is very rare. It was probably only multiplied in small quantities for the priests in the DP camp.

We could not find references to the title in the literature on the Slovenian DP printing (Rozina Švent, Publicistična dejavnost slovenske emigracije po drugi svetovni vojni, 1992; Janez A. Arnež, Slovenski tisk v begunskih taboriščih v Avstriji, 1945-1949).

We could only find one institutional example (National and University Library of Slovenia).