Janez Evangelist Krek

Janez Evangelist Krek (27 November 1865 – 8 October 1917) was a Slovene Christian Socialist politician, priest, journalist, and author.

He was born in a peasant family in the village of Sveti Gregor (now in the Municipality of Ribnica in Lower Carniola), in what was then the Austrian Empire. His father died when he was a child. After finishing the state gymnasium in Ljubljana in 1884, he entered the Roman Catholic seminary. He was consecrated priest in 1888, and sent to the theological faculty in Vienna by the bishop Jakob Missia. There, he became acquainted with the new Austrian Christian Social movement of the charismatic politician Karl Lueger. Krek graduated in 1892, and was appointed vicar in the Ljubljana Cathedral. From 1985, he taught philosophy at the Catholic seminary.

He soon became involved in politics within the conservative Slovene People's Party. In 1897, he was elected representative to the Austrian Parliament. In 1900, he decided not to run for a second turn. In 1901, he was elected representative in the Provincial Diet of Carniola.

Already in his early Viennese years, Krek had published critical articles against liberalism. Influenced by the ultra-conservative thought of the Roman Catholic bishop of Krk Anton Mahnič, and by the encyclic Rerum novarum, he attacked the liberal economic system as being anti-social and anti-democratic. Between 1898 and 1907, Krek organized several peasant and worker's co-operatives, and transformed the Slovene People's Party from a conservative clerical party into a mass political movement propagating social emancipation on the basis of Catholic political ideology. As the result such mobilization, the People's Party won by landslide the first elections by general suffrage in Austria in 1907, gaining 20 of the 24 Slovene seats in the Austrian Parliament. Krek was among those elected.

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