The new archbishop's key responsibility will be a new round of negotiations with the state, Dnevnik says under "Archbishop Negotiator".
"Archbishop Alojz Uran was not a negotiator. He knew little about politics. DD Stres understands the state very well. Not only because he is an authority on Hegel's philosophy, the centre of whose analysis is the concept of the state. DD Stres also has rich experience and contacts."
Dnevnik points out that he was linked closely with the network that was establishing first political parties in Slovenia two decades ago. As representative of the Slovenian Roman Catholic Church the new archbishop backed Kosovo miners at the 1989 meeting in their support at the Ljubljana convention centre Cankarjev dom.
The paper also says that rumours that Stres could become the new archbishop of Ljubljana already appeared in the mid 1990s, when the "refined and popular" Archbishop Alojzij Sustar was getting retired.
However, the paper also says that Stres will not be a copy of Franc Rode, who succeeded Sustar then. It is true they are both Lazarites and both studied in Paris, but the new archbishop knows the situation in Slovenia too well to afford the kind of tactless remarks Rode used to make.
Even less will he be a copy of Uran, whom Dnevnik calls a kind-hearted shepherd. Stres is a man of sharp wit, a top intellectual, a doctor of theology, a man of broad horizons.
This does not mean that he does not have very clear and specific goals ahead. He will turn 75, the age of his retirement in the Church, in 2016. "We have seven lively years ahead of us."
