On the morning of July 31, Cardinal Ernest Simoni celebrated Mass at Spaç — the former forced-labor prison built around a copper and pyrite mine in central Albania — in memory of those who suffered and died there under the communist regime of Enver Hoxha. He is 97 years old. He spent 18 years of his life inside that place, most of them as a young priest working the mines, celebrating the Eucharist in secret from memory because discovery would have meant death.
At the end of the Mass, a letter from Pope Leo XIV was read aloud. “No chain is strong enough to imprison a conscience enlightened by the Gospel; no night is so long that it can prevent the dawn the Lord prepares for His children; and no prison is deep enough to separate a person from the love of God,” the Pope wrote, echoing Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans (8:35-39).
The story behind the return
Cardinal Simoni was arrested on Christmas Day 1963, sentenced to death as “an enemy of the people,” and then had his sentence commuted to 25 years of forced labor. He spent most of that time in the mines at Spaç, which had opened in 1968 as one of the harshest detention facilities run by what was then the world’s first officially atheist state. All religious practice was prohibited. Priests who celebrated the sacraments risked immediate execution.
The young Father Simoni celebrated them anyway. “During my imprisonment, I risked my life each time. I celebrated Mass from memory in Latin, heard confessions, and distributed Holy Communion in secret. I baked the bread using flour cooked over makeshift stoves and used juice squeezed from grapes for the wine,” he told those present at Friday’s Mass. “If they had found me, they would have hanged me immediately.” He showed the congregation the miner’s helmet he had worn as a young priest when he descended into the mine shafts.
After an uprising at the camp in 1973, Father Simoni was sentenced to death a second time as an alleged instigator. The sentence was again not carried out. He was freed in 1981 but remained under surveillance, forced to clean sewers in Shkodër — still classified as an enemy of the people — until the fall of the regime in 1990. He carried out his priestly ministry clandestinely throughout.
Leo XIV’s message
The Pope called Spaç “one of the most painful chapters in the nation’s history” and “a place where many carried the heavy cross of injustice.” He reflected on those whose names were never recorded, whose graves were never marked: “How many prayers must have risen to Heaven from that place! How many supplications were whispered in the heart! How many people, marked by suffering and deprivation, entrusted their last hope to the Lord!”
Leo asked that their memory not fade with the generation that survived them. “May their memory remain alive and be for new generations a constant reminder of the inviolable dignity of the human person, of the value of freedom, and of the commitment to peace,” he wrote.
The connection between the two men predates this letter. In April, Cardinal Simoni visited Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican in a private audience, presenting him with a cross and a relic of the Albanian martyrs. It was the first time Cardinal Simoni had met the new pope in person.
Pope Francis, who made Simoni a cardinal in November 2016 after visiting Albania in 2014 and meeting the priest whose story of clandestine fidelity had moved him deeply, once described him as a “living martyr.” The description has not aged badly. On Friday morning, at 97 years old, the cardinal stood in the place where he had once risked hanging to consecrate bread and wine, and did it again, in the open, in the sun, before a crowd that could watch without fear.
