Pope Reawakens Church in Once-Atheist Albania

It was a hallelujah Sunday for Europe’s poorest nation: Pope John Paul II came in golden robes to celebrate a national resurrection. There can have been few spring days in the past half century as exalting for a Balkan land so long self-consumed by tyranny, isolation and the systematic persecution of all religion.

Improbability reigned for a day in a time-stood-still place whose Communist leaders once proclaimed the world’s first officially atheist nation. In their wake, remnant concrete pillboxes sprout from green hillsides like evil toadstools.

The world’s most famous Albanian, octogenarian apostle of the poor, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, humbly came in sandals and her trademark blue-and-white habit. But she did allow herself to be coaxed into an aging black Mercedes to ride in the papal motorcade along winding, pitted country lanes that are Albania’s national highways.

“Your experience of death and resurrection belongs to all the church, and to all the world,” John Paul told 5,000 worshipers at a Mass in the provincial town of Shkoder. Many wept at the sight of him. The faithful overflowed a freshly repainted 19th-Century cathedral reconsecrated last Christmas Eve after decades as a state-run gymnasium.

John Paul ordained four bishops as administrators of a reborn church, naming them successors to the apostles from under a wooden cross where a basketball scoreboard once hung. Three of the new bishops spent long years in detention for their faith, one condemned to death as a Vatican spy. The fourth, an exiled pastor of an Albanian Catholic church in New York, came home to Shkoder on Sunday with 120 proud parishioners from the Bronx who brought a large American flag to Mass with them.

In an exhausting 13-hour visit, John Paul repeatedly lauded Albanians for their victory in overturning their nation’s hard-line Communist rule.

“You have won back freedom in a virtually bloodless way. You are risen almost miraculously from an abyss of tyranny and death,” he said in a nationwide address. “When it seemed that every rational hope of faith had been snuffed out, liberation has come. Life is reborn. The courage to exist has re-emerged. The light of hope shines anew.”

The Pope applauded Albanian Catholics for their steadfastness during a “shameful winter of suffering and trial” in which a “heroic church in Albania was convulsed by harsh and prolonged persecution. Europe and the world must never forget.”

To a huge crowd jamming the main Scanderbeg Square in central Tirana at nightfall Sunday to hear John Paul’s farewell message, the Pope preached brotherhood. Albanians, he said, must beware of ethnic disputes as they seek to build democracy from communism’s shards.

Most Albanians are Muslims. Among a Christian minority, Greek Orthodox outnumber Roman Catholics who, concentrated in the north around Shkoder, are about 10% of Albania’s 3.4 million people.

Fighting its way from virtual anarchy that followed the collapse of communism in 1991, Albania relies on international aid to support its weak, agrarian economy. Strains, through, have not manifested themselves in ethnic unpleasantness.

“Three great religious communities share reciprocal esteem and cordial collaboration. Remain in that path,” John Paul said, warning Albania away from the ethnic tragedies of the neighboring republics of what used to be the Yugoslav federation.

Seen throughout Eastern Europe as a catalyst for the death of communism, the Polish Pope drew across-the-board cheers in Albania.

His one-day visit to the last European country to abandon Marxism transcended religion. In Albanian eyes, at least, it became a international benediction of the national search for change.

“This visit touches and rejoices the heart of every Albanian regardless of his religious belief, because for us you have long become a symbol of hope,” President Sali Berisha, a Muslim, said in welcoming John Paul.