“In the beginning, all Albanians were Catholics, and Albania was the first Christianized country after Italy (…) Under Turkish occupation, Albanians converted to Islam for purely practical reasons: for a career, for studies… But this is very superficial, because Albanian culture remains Christian” (Ismaïl Kadaré).
It is true that the Christianization of this country is as old as Christianity, because the Apostle Paul taught in Illyria, the future Albania. Durres and Shkodra are among the first bishoprics in the history. Saint Jerome, author of the Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) in the fourth century, was Albanian. Like Clement XI, Pope elected in 1700. Literature, school, but also fierce resistances against the Turks for five centuries, in the history of Albania owe much to Catholicism. Of course, the communist regime did not even mention that in the fifteenth century it was in the name of his Catholic faith that Skanderberg, an Albanian national hero, stopped the Turks.
On May 6, 1988, as part of the Marian Year, the Holy Father received two hundred pilgrims from Albanian emigration who had come from Europe and America to pray to Our Lady of Good Counsel – a replica of the one from Shkodra – in Genazzano near Rome. In their presence, he expresses the hope that the Church “will be able to enjoy religious freedom again” and implores with them the Virgin of Shkodra to hasten the arrival of the day when the Albanian people “will see again their deepest spiritual aspirations.”
Bernard Lecomte “The Pope Who Overthrew Lenin”; CLD Publishing House, Tours 2007
