My meeting with Albania’s ‘living martyr’, Cardinal Ernest Simoni

Last week I met a man who was sentenced to death twice and subjected to multiple beatings and torture. He did 18 years hard labour in a mine in brutal, often freezing conditions, and then another ten years clearing sewage from canals. That man was Cardinal Ernest Simoni, an Albanian priest who turns 98 next month.

Cardinal Simoni was one of only many priests savagely persecuted by the communist government which ruled Albania from 1945 until its fall in 1991. From 1945 until his death in 1985, the country’s ruler was Enver Hoxha, one of the most hardline communists of all and one of the most anti-religious of all.

Every religion was persecuted under Hoxha. In fact, Albania is majority Muslim. But the Catholic Church was persecuted with a particular savagery because it was (rightly) considered to be the biggest threat to the communist State. Hoxha would have been aware of the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland and how it provided a rival source of authority to the communist party.

Although, as mentioned, most Albanians were, and are, Muslim, they had nothing equivalent to the pope outside of Albania to look to.

Hoxha would have seen in due course how Pope John Paul II played a role in bringing communism to an end in Poland, and therefore elsewhere in Europe also. The best way to prevent anything like this from happening in Albania was to crush the Catholic Church completely.

To this end, every Catholic place of worship was either destroyed or converted into something else. Dozens of priests, bishops and religious were executed in the late 1940s. All foreign clergy were expelled.

Prison

By the end of 1946, half of clergy were in prison. By the 1950s, the rest had either fled, were dead, or in prison. A tiny handful were in hiding.

In 1967, Albania was declared an officially atheistic regime and even the private practice of religion was banned. Persecution of Muslims was stepped up.

Mother Teresa, who was born in Albania, was lucky she was in India before the communist takeover. If she had been still living in her native country when this happened, it is likely the world would never have heard of her.

Cardinal Simoni was born in a small town in northern Albania in 1928. Northern Albania is where the vast majority of the country’s Catholics live. This region has a strong Italian influence. Around 10% of all Albanians are Catholic.

His captors asked Fr Simoni to leave the priesthood and even offered him marriage to do so. When he refused, he was sentenced to death”

Despite the general persecution of the Church, Cardinal Simoni, or Fr Simoni as he would have been then, somehow escaped prison in the first years of communist rule. But the authorities finally caught up with him in 1963. On Christmas Day that year, he celebrated Mass in memory of the recently assassinated President John F Kennedy. The pope had asked Catholic priests worldwide to do so. He was then arrested.

His captors asked Fr Simoni to leave the priesthood and even offered him marriage to do so. When he refused, he was sentenced to death, but that was commuted to hard labour down the mines instead.

Fr Simoni would have been 35 at this point. He did not emerge fully into the world again until 1990, when the communist government in Albania was just about to collapse.

It is hard to fathom how much the world would have changed in the meantime in his eyes. When Fr Simoni was sentenced to hard labour, the Second Vatican Council had barely begun. Perhaps he got some inkling by the time he was working in the sewage canals in the 1980s that the Latin Mass had been replaced by the New Mass. But he would never have been to Mass in the new form or celebrated it.

When he was in Ireland last week, as a guest of Aid to the Church in Need Ireland, it was striking how old-school his spirituality and preaching were. He attended the lunchtime Mass in St Teresa’s on Clarendon Street in Dublin and addressed the congregation afterwards in his native Albanian. An assistant translated.

Supernatural

It was obvious listening to him that for Cardinal Simoni, the supernatural is as real as the natural. He sees it all around him. He speaks with the urgency of the preachers of old. He firmly believes we are all engaged in spiritual warfare and need the help of Jesus and Mary, the angels and the saints, to persevere. He speaks about Hell in a totally unembarrassed way, and of the existence of demons. He doesn’t do so in a hellfire and damnation sort of way, designed to frighten listeners, but matter-of-factly.

At the end of his remarks, he said a prayer of exorcism, as he likes to do, and as has been his practice since he was a young priest in Albania.

{{It is amazing to think he is nearly 98. He is still extremely energetic and remarkably unembittered and unhardened by his time in captivity”

Afterwards, a group of Albanians and Irish Travellers came to him to be blessed.

Cardinal Simoni then went on to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, accompanied by his entourage and staff from Aid to the Church in Need. While there, he met and encouraged the seminarians.

It is amazing to think he is nearly 98. He is still extremely energetic and remarkably unembittered and unhardened by his time in captivity. His mind remains very sharp. He keeps to a very busy schedule. He travels all the time. Before coming to Ireland, he had met King Charles in Balmoral and then attended an engagement in Birmingham.

Tempus Fugit

When you have spent so long in captivity, time is precious. Tempus Fugit.

But even when he was down the mines and working in the sewage canals, he continued to minister quietly and in secret to fellow prisoners. This is how saints are made and it led to him being sentenced to death again in 1973. This was commuted once more when his fellow prisoners pleaded on his behalf.

Finally released in 1990, he met his fellow Albanian, Mother Teresa, in 1991. Imagine the conversation they must had had.

It is hard to believe that Europe had an officially atheistic regime as recently as 1991”

In 2016, Pope Francis made him a cardinal. In that same year, the pope beatified 38 Albanian Catholics martyred by the communists. Some of them died horribly. Francis described Cardinal Simoni as a “living martyr”. He is the last Albanian priest left alive from that era.

It is hard to believe that Europe had an officially atheistic regime as recently as 1991 that had brutally repressed religion for so long. It was a great honour to meet Cardinal Simoni while he was here in Ireland. It is one of those memories that will last a lifetime.