Pope will find fast-changing church in Albania

When Pope Francis arrives in Albania this Sunday he will find a very different Catholic Church from the one that his predecessor John Paul II visited two decades ago.
By ALTIN RAXHIMI
The painting that kicks off Pjerin Sheldija’s cycle on the travails of Albania’s Franciscan order, which intermingles with Via Crucis sequences at the Friars’ Church in Shkodra, sports a horned devil who guides a mustachioed Communist partisan, menacing two friars who carry armloads of rifles.
It refers to an actual event in 1945, when Communist partisans allegedly stashed the friars’ monastery with weapons during the night and then accused them of assisting anti-Communist rebels the next morning.
Another of Sheldija’s paintings in the church, titled “Faith Attested by Blood”, describes how the Catholic faith was preserved in this corner of the Balkans despite the pressure to convert to Islam under the Ottoman Empire.
The painting shows two friars being crucified in front of a man with a tasseled red fez and a barrel-chested swordsman.
Under the marble floor of the church to the left lies the remains of Gjergj Fishta, a nationalist Franciscan polymath whom many consider Albania’s national poet.
Stalinist Albania was unforgiving to priests like Fishta. A member of the Academy of Sciences of Rome during the Fascist era in Italy, his books were banned and his name purged from literature textbooks during their iron-fisted rule.
The church and convent in Shkodra, like nearly all places of worship, were gutted, profaned by conversion into warehouses or shut down and demolished – only to be rebuilt after the regime collapsed.
Albania’s strictly atheist form of communism in the second half of the 20thcentury was a major trauma for the country’s Catholics.
The regime all but wiped out religious practice and forced everyone to pay lip service to Communist anti-religious tirades under the threat of imprisonment.
“During communism, I was accustomed to drawing the ‘good partisan’,” Sheldija, the painter, recalls. “As atonement I now do ‘bad partisans’, and even that needed some getting used to,” he added.
After nearly half-a-century of rule, communism violently collapsed in 1991. The country by then was left with only a handful of octogenarian clerics, many of whom emerged fresh from labour camps and jails.
Albania will host this weekend Pope Francis’s first visit to a European country, where he has said he wants to bear witness to the recovery of a martyred church and nation.
It is the second papal visit to Albania, following the 1993 landmark trip of Karol Wojtyla.
Catholics number only about a tenth of Albania’s population of 3 million. People from a Sunni Muslim background make up more than half, while the rest are divided between Shia Muslim sects dominated by the Bektashis and Orthodox Christians.
Some Catholic believers are recent converts from other religions, including a handful of the current clergy. The priest who served until recently the deeply Catholic Mirdita region, for example, is named Kemal, an Albanian rendering of the Arab word, Gamal.
Despite its small size, the Catholic community played an outsized role in the Albanian nationalist revival in the early 20th century under the Ottoman Empire.
Members of the Catholic clergy founded Albania’s literary tradition, while many composers, musicians or actors came from Sunday choirs or bandstands.
Documentary photography was developed by a Catholic family, the Marubis, who began their work in the city of Shkodra in the late 19th century.
The Catholic community historically lived in the northwest, a good part of it composed of traditional mountain people whose “an eye-for-an eye” beliefs, based on the mythologized medieval code of Leke Dukagjini, existed alongside conventional religious dogmas.
The northern city of Shkodra has historically been the urban centre of Albanian Catholicism. There, after half-a-century of harsh Communist rule, the faith has experienced a revival in the last two decades.
Inter-marriages between Catholics and members of other religions have always been rare and ostracized, and the Catholics still live somehow segregated to the north of this city’s even religious divide.
The once run-down buildings that constituted the historic Catholic quarter of Gjuhadol have now been re-plastered and renovated and repainted in pink or Parma yellow – a tourist attraction that has given the neighbourhood new life and wealth.
The Jesuits run a large seminary. The Don Bosco community centre gathers children from all religions, and the Church runs some of the area’s best schools.
The belfry of the Friar’s Church and convent, rebuilt in the late Nineties, now rivals the minarets of a large Saudi-funded mosque across the street.
However, Sheldija, who witnessed the early masses in his hometown when churches reopened and has been a Sunday churchgoer ever since, says that although people then had less knowledge about the faith, they were more devout.
“Now the knowledge is there but the practice is more superficial,” he said.
Nor is the city of Shkodra Albania’s Catholic capital any longer.
According to Fr Gjergj Meta, the church’s youthful spokesman, a third of the country’s Catholics, mostly from impoverished areas of the north, but also educated urban Catholics, have migrated to more mixed religious areas around Tirana and Durres.
Meta notes that the Church has changed, by adapting to its followers’ new environment. The number of mixed marriages in this highly mixed part of the country has increased, so that negotiated church marriages with people of other confessions constitute the majority of Fr Meta’s Sunday ceremonials.
The demographic shift has also brought about changes on how the Catholic Church perceives its role.
“We had been a church of doctrine,” Fr Meta said, sitting in his guest room, by the Church of St Lucy in the coastal town of Durres, a 20-minute drive west from the capital, Tirana.
St Lucy’s church is located in a traditionally Muslim neighborhood of Durres where now many Roma families live and which is home to only two Catholic families, according to Fr Meta.
According to the friar, tending to his community’s needs has taken precedence over proselytizing. “We are now veering towards becoming a church whose priority is serving people in need,” he said.