Faithful to the Cause of Religion in Albania : Ministry: Santa Ana priest faces a daunting task in once-atheist nation. Progress is slow but meaningful.

For nearly three decades, Iftijime Hazizi had waited, hoping that one day he would again hear the bell of St. Martin’s Church ring across the meager farms of this remote village.

But when it finally pealed one recent morning, signaling the beginning of the first Orthodox service here in 29 years, Hazizi was overcome.

“I was the bell ringer, before,” the elderly man said, tears slipping down his weathered face. “But for so long, the bell did not ring.”

Hazizi’s words, poignant reminders of the harshness of Albania’s history, represent both inspiration and challenge to Father Martin Ritsi, the Orange County priest who celebrated Jeronisht’s historic liturgy in April.

“Everywhere you look, there’s so much to be done,” Ritsi said wearily, near the end of the 16-hour day that began with the emotional service. “You can dwell on that and get overwhelmed, or you can look at the miracles we’re seeing every day. To see those faces today, it’s almost like their freedom’s come now.”

The task taken on by the American priest--helping to resurrect religion in long-isolated, once-atheist Albania--is truly daunting.

More than four years after Albania’s absolute ban on religion was lifted, many churches and mosques have yet to be rebuilt. Others, confiscated by the government years ago, have not been returned. And many Albanians still know little about the ways of their faiths: Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism.

In villages such as Jeronisht, hidden among the rocky cliffs and blooming fruit trees of central Albania, people talk and even smoke in church. They are ignorant of hymns and rituals; many have no idea what a Bible is.

But their often-boisterous enthusiasm gives strength to priests such as Ritsi.

It was in 1992 that Ritsi felt a call to join the handful of clergy struggling to revive the Orthodox church in this Balkan land, which held itself apart from the world for nearly half a century and where all religion was systematically persecuted.

Although the political situation was far from settled, the priest, now 36, his wife Renee, 34, and their children, Stephanos, 9, and Nicole, 8, quickly packed up their Santa Ana household and moved to Albania, the poorest nation in Europe.

Since then, Ritsi has made strides in his effort to help rekindle the Orthodox church, slowly persuading his growing flock to substitute spirituality for the nationalism that Albania’s Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, once boasted was his country’s true religion.

It has not been easy. Along with the difficulties of living in a nation where unemployment hovers around 30% and electricity and water service remain sporadic, Ritsi and his fellow religious leaders must cope with other hardships that are the legacy of nearly five decades of totalitarianism.

The Albanian people suffered under one of history’s cruelest, most repressive dictatorships. Hoxha, the hard-line Stalinist who ruled this nation from 1944 until his death in 1985, sought to govern every aspect of his people’s lives, turning Albania into a giant, sealed prison.

Beards were prohibited. Private car ownership was banned. Albanians who littered, played foreign music or complained about the quality of tools at a government factory could land in prison. And in an excess that became a lasting symbol of his paranoid regime, Hoxha ordered the construction of 700,000 concrete bunkers throughout the country, preparing his backward nation for an invasion that never came.

In 1967, Hoxha proclaimed this the world’s first officially atheist state. The government confiscated churches, monasteries and mosques, and any religious expression became grounds for imprisonment. The ban lasted until 1990, when an increasingly restive population demanded changes that led to communism’s fall in 1992.

By that time, most of Albania’s Orthodox churches and chapels--about 1,600 in all--had been razed, church leaders say. Others were transformed into stables, restaurants, gymnasiums and bars. A small number survived relatively unscathed, but most of those have yet to be returned, a delay church leaders believe stems from the church’s still testy relationship with the Albanian government.

And only a handful of the priests who served in Albania before the ban remained to see it lifted. Of an estimated 335 Orthodox clergy who lived here in 1967, only 23 were left by 1990. Their average age was more than 70.

“Under the Communists, we had to work very carefully, very secretly and with fear,” said Father Lefter Shqahu, 80, an Orthodox priest who was among the few to avoid imprisonment under Hoxha’s rule. “I did some baptisms in the house, at night and telling no one, just the family. But always, we were afraid that someone would spy and tell the authorities.”

The Albanian Orthodox church “was absolutely destroyed,” says Anastasios Yannoulatos, its Greek-born archbishop. “We don’t have something parallel, even in the other Communist countries.”

With all faiths now free to operate, the competition for souls is intense. But the numbers are a matter of guesswork. In 1967, about 70% of Albania’s population of 3.3 million was believed to be Muslim, with about 20% Orthodox Christians, concentrated in the south, and 10% Roman Catholic, mostly in the north.

Ritsi and other Orthodox church leaders believe, however, that 600,000 to nearly 1 million Albanians, or as much as 30% of the population, are Orthodox by family tradition. And many are eager, at long last, to practice their religion openly.

The situation remains most difficult, they say, in far-flung villages such as Jeronisht, which is separated from Albania’s capital by hours of travel over rutted, occasionally treacherous roads. With so few priests, and most of those elderly and without transportation, services are nearly nonexistent.

In Tirana, Albania’s dilapidated capital of about 400,000, growing numbers appear to be responding to the church’s outreach programs. During Easter celebrations, thousands filled the newly refurbished Orthodox cathedral and spilled into surrounding streets, reveling in their newfound freedom to worship in public.

But that same holy weekend, Ritsi struggled through a Saturday morning Easter service in the village of Narta for a paltry few worshipers, who prayed to the strains of anything-but-solemn music from a neighboring bar.

The priest’s expectations had been high for the service in Narta, a southern coastal community of about 5,000 people. Most residents are of Greek, and generally Orthodox, ancestry.

But the hand-carried message that a liturgy would be held in the village that morning never arrived. By the time Ritsi and his party pulled up to the whitewashed stone church, many residents had embarked on their own, more secular celebration.

Just steps from the church entrance, tipsy patrons filled the bar’s smoky doorway. Inside, amid laughter and the merry, mid-morning clink of glasses of raki , a potent Albanian whiskey, a four-member band played, to the delight of its listeners.

Ritsi waited in the empty church, then made his way through a shortened service. At its end, a small blond girl wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt was the only person to take communion--except for an assistant whom the priest brought with him on the more than two-hour journey from Tirana.

“We came all the way out here to do a service for three people,” Ritsi said softly, almost to himself, as the driver left Narta behind. “We didn’t have anything better to do today.”

The experience, the priest said, was the worst he had known since he arrived in Albania.

Slumped in a chair the next night in his spare Tirana living room, Ritsi was drained by the week’s nearly nonstop Easter activities and still saddened by thoughts of Narta.

“Think how many villages there are like that,” he said, his voice intense, his dark eyes shadowed with fatigue. “There are believers there, but there’s no one to teach them, no one to lead them to worship. That’s all on our shoulders.

“It’s an awesome responsibility. But that’s why we’re in Albania.”

Martin and Renee Ritsi met in Irvine in the early 1980s, when both worked at St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church. Martin Ritsi, who had grown up in Tustin and San Clemente, was a recent psychology graduate of UC Santa Cruz and was leading the youth group at St. Paul’s, where his parents were members.

Renee Pateras had lived in Seal Beach and Santa Ana as a child, but she too had ties to the Irvine church, where her parents were also longtime members. When the two met, she was a student at UC Irvine, studying political science, and teaching a Sunday school class at the church. They married in 1984, then moved to Massachusetts, where Martin Ritsi finished a divinity degree at a Brookline seminary.

Early on, the couple discovered a mutual interest in mission work. Both were certain they wanted to spend a major part of their lives outside the United States, working for their church.

In 1987, when Stephanos was 1 1/2 years old and Nicole was just 6 months, the Ritsis became the first couple with children to be sent overseas by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, which was then expanding its foreign mission effort. Based in Nairobi, they worked in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, with Martin Ritsi acting as assistant to the area’s archbishop.

In Africa, the Ritsis met Yannoulatos, a progressive church leader who had worked to revive the Orthodox mission movement and strengthen its outreach programs for young people. In early 1992, during a brief stint back in the States, the Ritsis called the priest for advice on where they might next serve the church.

Yannoulatos immediately suggested Albania. He had been working as the church’s official emissary to Tirana for about a year, and would soon be named the country’s archbishop. The situation was difficult, he told the young couple, but their help was desperately needed.

The Ritsis talked with their children--quiet, reflective Stephanos and high-spirited Nicole--telling them of the difficulties they would surely face if the family moved to Albania. This new assignment would be even harder than Africa, they said. It might also be dangerous.

There was no hesitation. “Each of us felt so strongly that God was calling our family to come here,” Martin Ritsi said. “We know this is where we’re meant to be in life.”

Still, when they drove across the border from Greece that August of 1992, the Ritsis had their doubts. With each mile, the Albanian roads grew rougher and narrower. Finding the route to Tirana soon became a matter of faith: There were no directional signs at all.

When they finally reached the capital, the Ritsis found a volatile, increasingly desperate situation.

Five months earlier, Albania had become the last country in Europe to abandon Marxism, but the new Democratic government, led by a cardiologist named Sali Berisha, was far from stable. The power vacuum had created a situation of virtual anarchy and nearly every night, the family heard gunshots in the street outside their home.

Food was scarce. Almost every day, Renee Ritsi dragged her protesting children on treks around Tirana, searching for bread, milk, meat and anything that might replace the wintertime leeks or summertime eggplant that were often the only vegetables available. People were forced to wait in lines for almost every kind of food, and fights broke out daily.

Every six weeks or so for the first year, the Ritsis--feeling lucky they had a car, U.S. passports and money in their pockets--made the seven-hour drive to Greece to stock up on rice, sugar, flour, coffee and other staples.

Since then, the situation has improved markedly. Most basic foods are available, Renee Ritsi says, but they are often expensive, especially in light of the average worker’s earnings of about $50 a month.

Many luxury goods, such as televisions and other appliances, disappear from store shelves for weeks at a time for no apparent reason, then suddenly reappear.

Security is a continuing worry. The Ritsis’ home is protected by a high, locked gate and a friendly black and white dog, but crime is still common and the police, viewed by many as corrupt, provide little relief.

Late one afternoon, as her children played with their dog outside, Renee Ritsi stood in her crowded kitchen, stirring a pot of thick Albanian coffee and pondering life in this beautiful, backward country.

“We really feel challenged by living here,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t trade it. It’s an experience that makes life richer.”

Albania, her husband added, “is the most important place in the world right now where we could put our efforts, because of its past and present. Here, the government had really done everything it could to wipe Christianity out of the people’s lives and even out of their history.”

The priest’s role in helping to rebuild the Albanian Orthodox Church is many-faceted. He acts as the archbishop’s assistant and economist, keeping track of church finances, including all donations from outside the country. He teaches at its seminary, in a run-down rented hotel in the city of Durres, where 60 young and middle-aged men embody the church’s hope for an indigenous leadership in the future.

He started the church’s growing youth program, now taken over by a second American priest. For the past 18 months, he has run its development office, which has launched a variety of programs in the capital and outside it. And whenever he can, he heads to the villages, baptizing and teaching, gently guiding the people in forgotten or never-learned ways of their church.

For the service in Jeronisht, by tradition an Orthodox village, residents crowded into the small, bare church, stripped long ago of icons, furnishings and even its cross. Spring sunlight peeked through chinks in the wood-beam ceiling and partially boarded windows, softly lighting the faces of those within.

About 20 children, most wearing stained and frayed clothing, stood close together near the front of the church, gazing wide-eyed at Ritsi in his gold-and-cream vestments, and at the ornate chalice and incense-holder he had brought from Tirana. Behind them, the adults watched too, mostly attentive but from time to time chatting quietly during the nearly two-hour service.

Afterward, Renee Ritsi and Artan Kosti, the priest’s assistant who acted as her translator, stood in the shade of a blooming apple tree to tell a Bible story to the village women and children, who were seated in a circle on the grass as two donkeys grazed nearby.

At the lesson’s end, they passed out small, blue-covered Bibles and flower seeds, finally tossing the seed packets into the air as the villagers clamored, laughing, for their favorites.

It is these moments that Martin Ritsi cherishes, these visits that renew and sustain him during the difficult times when the challenge begins to seem too much.

At such times, he says, he thinks of places like Jeronisht and of the hopeful faces of the faithful who waited for him that day outside their little-used church, breaking into smiles as his Jeep approached.

“To see their faces, so interested, so curious, it’s so inspiring,” the priest said, seated on the stone steps of a village home, gazing at the purple shadows painted by the setting sun. “And then I know this is exactly where I’m meant to be.”

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Father Martin Ritsi: A Profile

* Age: 36

* Arrived in Albania: 1992

* Mission: Help revive Orthodox faith

* Current job: Assistant to the Orthodox Archbishop of Albania, director of the church’s development program

* Current church: Orthodox Cathedral of Tirana

* Previous church: St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox, Irvine

* Education: UC Santa Cruz, bachelor’s degree, psychology; Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary, Brookline, Mass., Masters in Divinity; Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Masters of Theology in Missiology

* Family: Wife Renee; son, Stephanos; daughter, Nicole

* Situation assessment: “There is so much to be done here, the potential, and the needs, are so great.”

Source: Times reports