The news on the appointment was released by Apostolic Nuncio to Slovenia Juliusz Janusz, while the Holly See also published it on its web site around noon, Secretary General of the Bishops' Conference Tadej Strehovec said.

Zore has been the provincial of the Slovenian Franciscan province of St Cross since April 2010 (serving a second term), and the president of the Conference of religious orders in Slovenia.

Born in 1958 in Sela pri Kamniku, Zore was ordained priest in 1985 after graduating at the Theological Faculty in Ljubljana.

He has been the head of the Brezje and Sveta Gora pilgrimage sites.

Strehovec called the appointment of Zore a "pleasant surprise", adding that the new Ljubljana archbishop would address the press on Friday.

It is not known yet, when Zore will be invested.

Ljubljana archbishops are usually invested at the St Nicolas Chatedral by apostolic nuncio in Slovenia. After receiving a crossier, the new archbishop symbolically sits on the bishop's seat and continues the Mass.

The Ljubljana Archdiocese has been without the archbishop since the end of July 2013, when Pope Francis accepted the resignations of Ljubljana Archbishop Anton Stres and Maribor Archbishop Marjan Turnšek over the financial scandal at the Maribor Archdiocese.

In the intermediate period Novo mesto Bishop Andrej Glavan served as the apostolic administrator of the Ljubljana Archdiocese.

According to experts, 14 months is not an unusually long period for Ljubljana to be without archbishop, especially in the given circumstances.

Stres and Turnšek's resignations had been prompted by the pope after the financial collapse of the Maribor Archdiocese, which affected Slovenia's largest bank NLB as well as several companies among others.

The news that the Maribor Archdiocese had run up EUR 800m in debts was first broken by the Italian weekly L' Espresso in January 2011, while the Holy See had allegedly known about it since as early as late 2007.

The diocese managed its financial operations through the firm Gospodarstvo rast, which in turn controlled holdings Zvon Ena and Zvon Dva. All three firms have entered receivership, with creditors registering a total of more than EUR 1.7bn in claims. The biggest creditor was NLB.

Stres and Turnšek were not the only Slovenian church dignitaries that have had to retire in the wake of the scandal. Mirko Krašovec, who resigned as chief of financial operations at the Maribor Archdiocese soon after the scandal erupted, was forced to move abroad, while the retirement of Archbishop of Maribor Franc Kramberger in February 2011 was widely interpreted as a repercussion of the scandal.