Pope honors Albanian cardinal as ‘living martyr’
February 14, 2024
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CWN Editor's Note: Pope Francis paid tribute to an elderly Albanian cardinal as a “living martyr” at the conclusion of his public audience on February 14.
The Pope mentioned that 95-year-old Cardinal Ernest Simoni was in attendance at the audience, and “continues to bear witness” after having suffered 28 years in Albanian prisons, which were “perhaps the cruelest.”
Cardinal Simoni was ordained to the priesthood secretly in 1956, after having studied underground. (Earlier he had been living in a monastery until government trooped seized the building, killed the friars in residence, and evicted the younger students.) He was arrested in 1963 after having celebrated Christmas Mass, and spent the next 29 years in prison—sometimes in solitary confinement, sometimes at hard labor. Pope Francis raised him to the College of Cardinals in 2016, as a tribute to his suffering.
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