Cardinal Ernest Simoni, the Albanian priest whose long suffering under communism made him one of the most striking living witnesses to the persecuted Church in Europe, has presented Pope Leo XIV with a relic of the Albanian martyrs during a private audience at the Vatican. The meeting, held on April 26 and attended by around 40 members of the cardinal’s family, was marked by recollection of the Church’s endurance under one of the 20th century’s harshest atheist regimes.
According to Vatican media, the 97-year-old cardinal offered the Pope both a cross and a relic of those Albanian Catholics who died for their fidelity to Christ. Simoni said the martyrs had given their lives “out of fidelity and love for Jesus” and for the salvation of the Albanian people, presenting their witness as a testimony not only to suffering but to hope.
After the audience, Simoni described the meeting in warmly spiritual language, saying it had unfolded in an atmosphere of “joy and hope” as those present looked upon the Holy Father as a herald of peace, fraternity and love for all peoples. The tone of the encounter, as reported, was less ceremonial than symbolic: a persecuted confessor of the Faith standing before the new Pope with the memory of martyrs in his hands.
Simoni’s own life gives that gesture unusual force. Ordained in 1956, he ministered in Albania during the savage communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, under whose rule the country declared itself the world’s first atheist state and outlawed all religious practice. Arrested on Christmas Day 1963, he was sentenced to death, though the sentence was later commuted to forced labour. He spent 18 years in prison and, after his release in 1981, was forced to clean sewers in Shkodër while remaining under suspicion as an “enemy of the people”.
Even in prison, however, he continued his priestly ministry in secret. He celebrated Mass daily by stealth, using the fact that he prayed in Latin to avoid detection, since his guards assumed he had lost his mind and was speaking incoherently. That combination of fidelity, ingenuity and endurance is one reason he has so often been described as a living martyr of communism.
His witness first came to wide international attention during Pope Francis’s visit to Albania in 2014, when his testimony moved the late Pope deeply. Francis later made him a cardinal in 2016, publicly thanking him for a life of heroic perseverance that, he said, had done great good for the Church.
The latest audience with Leo XIV also carried a more personal resonance. On April 7 this year Simoni marked the 70th anniversary of his priestly ordination, and earlier in the month he had appeared with the Pope during the urbi et orbi blessing from the central loggia of St Peter’s Basilica. His meeting with Leo therefore appeared as part of a larger recognition of the suffering Church’s enduring place in the life of the universal Church.
