Slovenia's Roman Catholic Church lost four of its archbishops in less than four years. The removal of two successive leaderships has no parallel in recent European history, and its cause was largely a consequence of the collapse of the financial empire created by the Maribor Archdiocese. The question arises as to how this downfall has been reflected in the time series data concerning religious belief measured by the Slovenian Public Opinion Survey. According to this research, the values of variables/indicators pertaining to church adherence and religious belief have - in recent years - deviated little from the weak trend towards secularization apparent throughout the period of (post-socialist) transition, while the values of other variables (namely church attendance and trust in the institution) indicate an even greater distancing from the Church as an institution. This distancing is sufficient to be considered indicative of a new sociological state within the context of four distinct periods of (de)secularization in Slovenia identified by the SPOS survey since 1968.
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