Articles

The Church in Albania: From Ottoman Empire to Communism to? - The Irish Family

- Simon Roughneen in Tirana 

An old Albanian saw goes as follows: 'Where the sword is, there lies

religion' . Thus, under the long years of Ottoman rule, up to 70% of

Albanians converted to Islam, escaping the onerous taxes and dhimmitude

second-class citizenship imposed on non-Muslims. Before then, Albania's

strategic location on the marches between western and eastern Christianity

saw its people divide into largely northern Catholics and southern

Orthodox.

Later, under the Stalinism-on-steroids Hoxha regime, Albania was declared

the world's first atheist state, and the Catholic Church felt the force of

Tirana's totalitarian jackboot even more than Albania's other major

faiths. As Hoxha himself said: "The Muslim religion..[..]..was not as

serious an obstacle..[..]...as the Catholic", and as the Archbishop of

Tirana-Durres Rrok Kola Mirdita told this reporter "priests were called

Vatican spies, Hoxha feared us, many were executed".

In 1951, just one year after Blessed Teresa of Calcutta - one of Albania's

two national icons - was setting up her Missionaries of Charity in

Calcutta, Hoxha severed the Albanian Church link to the Vatican, and

between 1967 and 1990, no (public) Catholic Mass took place. By 1953,

just 10 Catholic clerics remained active in the country, and as Archbishop

Mirdita says "if you were caught even making the Sign of the Cross, you

would get 7 years imprisonment and hard labour".

After a Communist interlude as bizarrely-autarkic as it was

brutally-oppressive, Albania is now looking west, sending troops to Iraq

and Afghanistan, and opening its economy to foreign investors, though

serious issues remain with corruption and Albania's transnationalised

people-and drug-trafficking mafia.

"Albania is geographically European, and she has to come back" -

Archbishop Mirdita on the country's likely NATO accession and longer-term aspirations to join the European Union. But with religious devotion

much-attenuated after the brutal Hoxha era, it is secularised apathy as

much as its cultural pluralism that marks Albania out as a proto-western

country, and constitutes a serious challenge to religion in general.

Hoxha's atheist sword added non-belief to Albania's four official faiths -

Catholicism, Greek Orthodox, Sunni Islam, and Sufi-Islam Bektashism, with

the US State Dept estimating that over 60% of Albanians as non-practising.

But as the Archbishop pointed out, "it is the generation born and bred

under Communism that are indifferent to religion. We have a reversal of

the European experience, in that at Mass you see more younger people than

older."

Hope for the future, and Mirdita feels that Catholicism in Albania has a

steely resolve forged from centuries of alien rule and the dark years of

Communist oppression. Northern clans remained steadfast in the faith for

hundreds of years, in spite of Muslim domination, and even Hoxha's

agricultural collectivization schemes did not fragment the faith and

family bonds that sustained belief in the northern hills close to

Mirdita's birthplace across the border in Montenegro.

The Archbishop estimates that Catholics constitute 12-15% of the

population, and a construction boom is bringing Catholic workers south to

Tirana, enlarging Mirdita's diocese to 50,000 members, up from 1200 in

1944, when the last official statistics on Albanian religious demographics

were collated. However high land prices mean that building new churches

remains a challenge, and the Archbishop worries that vocations are being

hindered by Albania's high emigration rates, with over one million people

leaving the country since 1990.

As for inter-religious relations, Mirdita says "things are good, but

perhaps could be better. We set up an interreligious council. But I think

the harmony here is deep-rooted and traditional, and the relative peace

between different groups here could serve as a model for the region."

Just down the street from the Archbishop's office beside St Paul's

Cathedral, stand statues of Blessed Teresa, and Albania's other national

figure, Skanderbeg, the 15th Century general who fought the Ottoman

invaders and was granted Papal title for his efforts. Tirana's glossy new

international airport is named after Mother Teresa, and a bronze statue of

the future saint stands close to the Tirana Sheraton. Thus the ongoing

prominence of two non-Muslim icons in Albania's national hagiography

perhaps lends credence to the words of Vasho Pashka, a 19th Century poet

who said that "the religion of Albanians is Albanianism"

Archbishop Mirdita disagrees: "Mother Teresa's international renown and

winning of a Nobel prize was an immense boost to national pride, at a time

when Albania was suffering, and the country seen as something sinister in

the eyes of the world. Her example truly unites us all, but for Catholics

of course there is that added dimension, she is beatified, and her

holiness remains exemplary to us."