RELIGION : Papal Visit Brings New Season to Albania’s Hardy Christians

Spring is an evocative time for the relative handful of hardy Christians who live around the ramshackle provincial city of Shkoder in so-long-isolated Albania.

On April 25, 1967, Communist officials enforcing ferocious anti-religion laws sentenced Father Zef Simoni, a 38-year-old Catholic priest, to 15 years’ imprisonment: His crime was being a priest.

On April 25, 1968, they sentenced Father Franco Illia, 48, to death as “a spy for the Vatican” in a Stalinist dictatorship that trumpeted itself “the world’s first atheist nation.”

But the world turns, even in horse ‘n’ wagon Albania, the last country in Europe to come in from the Cold War.

On Sunday, April 25, 1993, Pope John Paul II will travel to Shkoder to ordain four bishops as a cornerstone of his revived church in the Continent’s poorest nation.

John Paul journeys to Albania on the business of a minority church there. But his 15-hour visit to Shkoder and the capital, Tirana, is, nevertheless, a welcome milestone for the predominantly Muslim nation.

As the mountainous Balkan republic of 3.4 million painfully claws back from anarchy that followed the 1990 collapse of communism, John Paul’s visit is tantamount to an international vote of confidence in a sunnier tomorrow.

Its economy in tatters, its government controversial and unstable, Albania is living off massive food, financial and administrative aid from the international community, particularly cross-Adriatic neighbor Italy.

When communism fell, tens of thousands of Albanians voted with their feet. About 200,000 now work in neighboring Greece, about 30,000 others in Italy. Their remittances are an important source of income for relatives back home. But Albania’s government, like Albania’s neighbors, is anxious to head off any new exodus.

John Paul, then, may pray with Catholics, about 13% of all Albanians, by the Vatican’s count. But in a calculatedly non-religious ceremony in Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square on Sunday evening, the Pope will deliver a “message to the nation” intended to comfort and encourage all Albanians, regardless of religion.

As John Paul well knows, Albania lives in a tough neighborhood: It abuts both Serbian ally Montenegro and the tinder-keg, Serbian-controlled territory of Kosovo, where nine people in 10 are ethnic Albanians but Serbs have all the guns.

For the Pope, visibly anguished by tragedy in the former Yugoslav republics, post-Communist Albania offers the chance to preach peace and fraternity to another nation where different ethnic communities live cheek by jowl.

As in so much of the Balkans, religion is stamped deep in Albanian history and character. As the Roman province of Illyria, Albania had 50 bishoprics in the 4th Century. The majority remained Christian until after the 15th-Century conquest by Ottoman Turks, who brought Islam with them.

By 1967, when dictator Enver Hoxha, then in his Maoist stage, banned religion as part of a disastrous cultural revolution, about half the people were still Muslim. The Vatican says about 18% were Orthodox, making Catholics the third-largest religious community.

All faiths have been free and growing again since 1990. But the relative number of faithful today is anybody’s guess. There is so-far amicable competition for souls among rebuilding Muslim communities aided by conservative Arab states, Catholics helped by the Vatican, two rival groups of Orthodox believers and a growing number of Protestant missionaries.

On his 58th foreign trip, the 72-year-old pontiff will appeal to all the religious communities for brotherhood and mutual understanding in the name of God and national renewal, Vatican aides say.