Fr Simon Jubani (pronounced: “you-bonnie”) spent much of his adult life in solitary confinement in an Albanian prison cell, where he was regularly tortured for his faith.
But he told me California was worse. “You are my Virgil,” Fr Jubani said at the end of our long weekend, referring to Dante’s guide in the Divine Comedy. “California was my Inferno.”
He spoke the words to me on a sidewalk outside of an elementary school shortly before I left him in Los Angeles to return to San Francisco.
This was the early 1990s and I had met him only a few days earlier. The National Catholic Register had hired me to accompany Fr Jubani on the last leg of a fundraising tour he was taking through America, hitting the biggest spots in the Albanian diaspora: Boston, Detroit, Chicago and now San Francisco and Los Angeles.
