A 97-year-old cardinal returns to offer Mass at the communist camp where he was a prisoner

At ninety-seven, a cardinal returned on 31 July to the Spaç forced-labour camp in Albania, where, as a young priest, he offered Mass in secret throughout his eighteen years of imprisonment. There he offered the holy Sacrifice for those who suffered and died in those mines. Arrested on Christmas Eve 1963 for having said a Mass for the repose of a murdered head of state, he was imprisoned for eighteen years, then, branded an « enemy of the people », set to labour in the sewers until the regime fell in 1990. Throughout his captivity he said Mass from memory, in Latin, at the risk of his life, and heard confessions and carried Communion in secret. « Each time, I risked my life », he recalled.

The Church has always venerated her confessors, those witnesses who, without shedding their blood, bore chains for the faith. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the sacrifice of the Mass is one and the same sacrifice as that of the Cross, offered upon our altars by the ministry of priests. And the Lord had forewarned His own: « Fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul. » The Apostle said it again: neither tribulation, nor persecution, nor the sword can separate us from the charity of Christ.

This is what an atheist regime could not put out: not ideas, but an altar. Where the priest was hunted, the priest still offered, from memory and in Latin, the immemorial rite that no dungeon abolishes. What was worth risking the gallows to celebrate in secret is worth keeping in broad daylight as well. The blood spilled in those mountains was, like that of the martyrs, a seed; and the fidelity of one priest judges, better than any long discourse, every prudence that today pares away what yesterday men died to preserve.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrifice of the Mass; Gospel of St Matthew 10:28; Epistle of St Paul to the Romans 8:35-39.