It’s quite something to see a 97-year-old draw the crowds. Cardinal Ernest Simoni Troshani did when he visited London. He survived 18 years in prison and a decade of hard labour in the sewers in communist Albania for being a priest.
When he was arrested in 1963 for saying a Requiem Mass for John F Kennedy – under the instructions of the then pope to priests – the charges at the trial were threefold. One was the Mass for JFK, an enemy of the people; the second was that he said that he would die for Christ and would not be a traitor to Him; the third was that he was an exorcist. He values that ministry. “I have been an exorcist for 70 years,” he told me over lunch in Knightsbridge, hosted by an Albanian restaurant owner. “Many people have been healed by Our Lady, not by me.” At the end of Masses, he raises his hand over the congregation, then both hands, as he says the Prayer to St Michael the Archangel to deliver them from earthquakes and other evils. It is, he says, a powerful prayer.
