The celebrations started on Sunday with a pilgrimage to Brezje (N), which was addressed by Archbishop of Ljubljana Stanislav Zore, who said that people in need were always in the focus of Karitas's work.

The anniversary will be marked by many local units of the Slovenian Caritas, including with the issuing of a special postage stamp with the slogan "25 Years of Caritas in the Service of Human Dignity".

The celebrations will culminate at the end of November with the Caritas Week which will feature the 25th traditional humanitarian concert entitled "The Call of Goodness".

The Slovenian Caritas was established on 1 May 1990 at the initiative from the then Ljubljana Archbishop and head of the Slovenian Bishops' Conference Alojzij Šuštar.

The organisations is active in providing material aid, having distributed more than 25 million tonnes of food in the last ten years. The total value of various aid programmes in the same period exceeded EUR 49m.

While in the first years of its work Caritas covered only a few thousand families, more than 20,000 families or more than 100,000 people in need have been involved in its programmes in recent years, according to the organisation.

It said it was constantly expanding the scope of its work, which also includes accommodation and care programmes for mothers with young children, drug addicts, alcoholics, homeless people and victims of human trafficking.

The Slovenian Caritas also helped refugees during the Balkan wars in the 1990s and helped build schools, kindergartens, health care centres and centres for undernourished children in Africa.