By Fr. Benedict Kiely As a young man of around fourteen or fifteen, it was an amusement, late at night in my bedroom in England, gently to move the dial on the shortwave section of my radio until it picked up the faint crackling broadcasts of Radio Tirana. It was the late 1970s and Albania was a mysterious and almost impossible place to visit. The broadcasts, with the signal going in and out, spoke of decayed Western capitalism and the glorious achievements of the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha. Sadly, at that early stage in my life, I did not realize that the humor of listening to this absurd propaganda hid the unutterable horrors of what ordinary Albanians, especially the persecuted Church, was enduring. Hoxha, the "Supreme Comrade, Sole Force and Great Teacher," after taking power in 1945, winning the "election" with an implausible 93 percent of the vote – his Communist Front was the only party allowed to stand – began immediately to persecute all religions, but attacked the Catholic Church with particular ferocity, alleging that it was a foreign and disloyal entity. Priests, bishops, and many laypeople were arrested, sent to work camps and prisons, tortured, and denounced. At one point, it is estimated that a third of Albanians were spied upon by their government, making Albania the world's first true total surveillance State. Christ's warning that children would betray their parents and parents their children came true; the possession of Bibles or religious images, if seen in the house, would lead to arrest and imprisonment. This persecution was intensified when, in 1967, Hoxha declared Albania to be "the world's first atheist State." All religious buildings, of all faiths, including all the churches, were either destroyed or occupied for secular purposes. The cathedral in Shkoder, the most Catholic part of Albania, for example, was turned into a gymnasium. The tortures and experiences of clergy and laity during this period, until the regime finally fell in 1991, defy belief. Saint John Paul II said that "history has never seen before what happened in Albania." Reading the chapter on Albania in Robert Royal's magisterial book The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, one is dumbfounded by the depravity and demonic cruelty inflicted upon Albanian believers. Prisoners were tied in sacks with wild animals – one of the beatified Albanian martyrs, a religious novice, Blessed Maria Tucci, was tortured to death in this manner. Along with other equally bizarre tortures and death sentences, prisoners of conscience were forced to work in mines and in other extreme conditions, with thousands dying of starvation, exhaustion, and sickness. Yet despite this intense persecution, as Communism collapsed between late 1990 and 1991, the underground Church emerged. Secret seminaries had been in operation, and a few of the priests who had been in captivity appeared in public. One such was Father Ernest Simoni. Ordained in 1956, he had been sentenced to death in 1963 for celebrating a Requiem Mass for President John F. Kennedy. When word reached Hoxha that Father Simoni would only utter words of forgiveness, somehow divine grace touched the heart of the dictator, and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. When arrested, he had told his captors that "we must forgive, love, and pray for our enemies." Suffering for nearly thirty years in prisons and the copper mines, he finished his sentence working for ten years in a sewage canal. Saint John Paul II visited Albania for one day in 1993 and ordained four bishops: men who had been secret seminarians were ordained shortly afterwards. During his pastoral visit to Albania in 2016, Pope Francis wept as he heard Simoni, then 84-years-old, dispassionately and humbly describe his suffering. To honor all the martyrs, including white martyrs like Fr. Simoni, Pope Francis named Ernest Simoni a Cardinal in 2016. A martyr, as we know, is a witness, if necessary to the point of death. A witne...
