“Does a glass or two harm the temperance campaign in the homeland ? Not at all .”

The Character of the Anti-alcohol Movement under the Leadership of Janez Kalan before the First World War

Abstract

Janez Kalan (1868–1945), a clergyman, editor and activist of the Catholic movement, who participated in St. Mary's Societies and edited the monthly Bogoljub (1903–1924), was the main figure of the anti-alcohol movement in Slovenia before and after the First World War. In 1903 he founded the Holy Army Anti-alcohol Association, and was also the editor of the anti-alcohol newspaper Zlata doba. Unlike his predecessors, he used a more tolerant strategy in the fight against alcohol. Absolute abstinency was not a precondition for membership in the Anti-alcohol Association. The movement was divided into the teetotallers and the “moderates” - those who abstained from spirits and were allowed to drink beer and wine moderately. Kalan was a very active and controversial person because, on the one hand, he preached ardently against alcohol and, on the other, was caught several times consuming it himself. In 1910 the liberal newspaper Slovenski narod made fun of that. The next year Kalan made a confession in Zlata doba that he had been drinking on the way to Jerusalem. In an anti-alcohol newspaper he even advertised “home-made” wine that apparently was better for people than “German” or “Jewish” spirits or beer. Under his leadership, the anti-alcohol movement was distinctly conservative and sought reasons for alcoholism and moral decay above all in the pernicious influence of modern society, and the solution to it in the re-Catholicization of society.