For the Catholics of Albania, the past year has been remarkable. In December 2015 came the news of the death of Archbishop Rrok Mirdita of Tirana, the principal figure in the restoration of Catholicism after communism. He had been ordained by St John Paul II in April 1993 during the pope’s visit to a nation that had suffered by far the most severe religious persecution of any country in modern times.
Then this year, on September 4, Pope Francis canonised Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an ethnic Albanian. She had been born in Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia, in 1910, two years before the emergence of the modern state of Albania after 500 years of Ottoman rule.
