At 97, Cardinal Ernest Simoni of Albania returned to the prison where he once risked hanging for saying Mass, and he said it there again, in the open.

 

Some people go back to the places that hurt them. Cardinal Ernest Simoni went back to celebrate Mass.

On the morning of July 31, the 97-year-old cardinal said Mass at Spaç, the former forced-labor prison built around a copper and pyrite mine in central Albania. Aleteia reports that he celebrated it in memory of those who suffered and died there under the communist regime of Enver Hoxha. He had spent 18 years of his life in that system, most of them as a young priest working in the mines.

A priest who would not stop

Simoni was arrested on Christmas Day 1963 and sentenced to death as “an enemy of the people.” The sentence was changed to 25 years of forced labor. Spaç opened in 1968 as one of the harshest detention facilities in what was then the world’s first officially atheist state. All religious practice was banned, and priests who celebrated the sacraments risked immediate execution.

Father Simoni celebrated them anyway. “During my imprisonment, I risked my life each time,” he told the people present. He said he celebrated Mass from memory in Latin, heard confessions, and gave Holy Communion in secret. He baked bread using flour cooked over makeshift stoves and used juice squeezed from grapes for the wine. “If they had found me, they would have hanged me immediately.” At the Mass, he showed the congregation the miner’s helmet he wore as a young priest.

After an uprising at the camp in 1973, he was sentenced to death a second time as an alleged instigator. It was again not carried out. He was freed in 1981 but stayed under surveillance and was forced to clean sewers in Shkodër until the regime fell in 1990. Throughout those years, he continued his priestly ministry in secret.

A letter from the Pope

At the end of the Mass, a letter from Pope Leo XIV was read aloud. The Pope called Spaç “one of the most painful chapters in the nation’s history.” He wrote, “No prison is deep enough to separate a person from the love of God,” echoing Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He asked that the memory of those who suffered never fade, so that it reminds new generations of human dignity, freedom, and peace.

The bond between the two men goes back to April, when Cardinal Simoni visited the Pope in a private audience and gave him a cross and a relic of the Albanian martyrs. Pope Francis, who made him a cardinal in 2016 after meeting him in Albania, once called him a “living martyr.”

Aleteia ends with an image: at 97, in the sun, before a crowd that could watch without fear, he did again what once could have cost him his life.

Let us pray for all who suffer for their faith.

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The Catholic Corner