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.

That is perhaps the reason for his remarkable appeal: he talks about the supernatural. In 1956, when Ernest Simoni was ordained, those supernatural elements of the faith were a matter-of-fact element of religion. His 28 years in detention, from 1963 to 1991, meant that he emerged into the post-Vatican II world with his old ways intact.

I saw him at Allen Hall seminary, where he told seminarians that their role was to bring to the world the joy of Christ. Then at Farm Street Church, he told the congregation that those who died in faith had nothing to fear because they would be entering into a life of joy and happiness in heaven. All completely unremarkable, except that this was delivered as something urgent. He is now rather bent, but refuses help in walking, except up steps. When I met him he didn’t want to talk about the past, but about the present, because that was more important. “Remember always to trust in Jesus,” he told me as he left.

The previous day, he had been to Manchester – four hours each way – and had celebrated Mass in Westminster Cathedral, packed with Albanians, where he spent nearly two and a half hours blessing people. By the end of his visit, his minders were looking shattered, while he was still forging ahead. How? “It’s the work of the Holy Spirit,” he said.

He is still a simple priest (he wore a Harley-Davidson sweatshirt over his clerical collar); indeed, he’s unique in modern times in becoming a cardinal without first being a bishop. He came from a family in Shkodra, the northern Albanian Catholic heartland, and his father was, he says, a poor man. His family recalled: “At the age of four I would run to the altar”; his vocation was evident. “We all have a vocation, and some follow it,” he observed. “And those who do have great happiness.”

He went to junior seminary at the age of 10, run by Franciscans, where the teachers, he says, were remarkable: all educated abroad in France, Italy and Germany.

He remembers the 1944 occupation of Albania by German and Italian forces. “They were respectful to priests and peaceable. We even met German priests. The Germans told us that they were there only in passing and would give us our own administration and that they were against atheistic communism. They built schools. Many Albanians flourished at that time.”

The communists came to power under the uniquely repressive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. “The attacks on religion started at once,” he said. “There were signs in the streets saying ‘unless we destroy the Catholic Church we will never win’. We were initially attacked as fascists. Fr Lazer Shantoja was the first to be killed.” The priest’s arms and legs were broken during torture. “The trials were public but the executions were not. I saw my professors lined up against a wall and shot. I was 18. We knew they intended to destroy the Catholic faith. When they were executing Fr Anton Harapi [as collaborator], in church, the ground shook.” But it wasn’t just priests who suffered; “the people too died for the faith,” he said.

In 1951, Stalin ordered that the Church in Albania should separate itself from the Vatican; the bishops refused. Mehmet Shehu, the prime minister, then said they could retain the link, so long as it was discreet. The seminary building was closed and it operated instead from the residence of an Austrian. Priestly formation continued and there were even new candidates. Fr Ernest was ordained in 1956. “I carried on with my ministry in several villages until 1963. In the geopolitical situation at the time, Albania was connected with Moscow, but once Albania united with China, everything changed.”

It was then that Fr Ernest was arrested on those triple charges, including exorcisms – “if people were being healed it would strain their communist allegiance”. He was tried in Shkodra, with a representative from Moscow watching. He was sentenced to be hanged. Was he frightened? “I laughed at them,” he said. “I told them that only God had my life in His hands and if you turn to Him, you will have eternal life.”

He was put in a cell with a prisoner whom he thought a friend, but who was a spy, reporting everything he said back to Hoxha himself. But he only said that we have a duty to love our enemies. “Hoxha heard this and said, ‘This doesn’t seem so bad’, so he commuted the sentence to prison.” He spent 18 years in prison, then 10 further years in hard labour, chiefly cleaning sewers.

Ten of those years were in the worst prison in Albania – Spaç, in a remote part of the Mirditë mountains. There prisoners worked in the mines, digging for copper; thousands died. He worked 600 metres underground.

“If one little rock had fallen on me, I would be gone,” he said. “Only by the grace of the Holy Spirit, I survived,” he said. “I prayed the rosary during that time. I even celebrated Mass with other prisoners. The wife of a Muslim artist smuggled in wine for Mass and for bread we used prison bread. By the end even my Muslim fellow prisoners knew the Latin Mass. I heard some confessions. If the authorities had found out, I would have been hanged.” How were relations with Muslims? “Fraternal,” he said emphatically. “We were all mixed. There were 5,000 men in that prison.”

From 1981 until 1991 he was outside prison, cleaning the sewers. On his release, returning to priestly life, he found the Church changed by the Second Vatican Council. What did he make of those changes?

“The light of the Spirit is greater than any changes,” he said. “I found it hard though to turn my back on Jesus in the Mass to face the people. I thought Jesus more important.” Mass in the vernacular wasn’t a problem – “we had Mass in Albanian before” – but he was sorry that the Latin Mass disappeared. “At least we had a certain unity with a Mass that everyone could understand.”

When he rose to leave, he said emphatically: “It’s up to each of us to understand that only Jesus has the power to raise us from the dead. He told us, ‘I will be with you always’; without Him, we cannot do anything.”

Christ was certainly with Ernest Simoni Troshani.

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