Pope finds lessons for the world in Albania

During a packed one-day visit to Albania last Sunday, Pope Francis affirmed the achievements of the formerly Communist country, while at the same time using the visit to illustrate how the Gospel should be lived today, and how the world’s worst conflicts need to be addressed.

He celebrated Mass for more than a quarter of a million people in Mother Teresa Square in the capital Tirana, and Vespers with the country’s Religious, seminarians, and lay movements in the Cathedral of St Paul; and he met leaders of other  Christian denominations and faiths at the Catholic University Our Lady of Good Counsel in Tirana. But it was in his visit to the Bethany Centre for disabled and needy children, founded by the Italian Antonietta Vitale in 1999, that he was able to draw together the main strands of his faith, now taking shape as the main strands of his papacy.

“Through humble gestures and simple acts of service to the least among us, the Good News that Jesus is risen and lives among us is proclaimed,” he said in his address at the centre. Noting that people of various ethnicities and religious confessions live together peacefully at the centre, he pointed out that genuinely religious people are good neighbours to all: “The variety of religious experiences reveals a true reverential love of neighbour; each religious community expresses itself through love and not violence,” he explained. Goodness, he continued, “offers infinitely more than money, which only deludes, since we have been created to receive and offer the love of God, not measuring everything in terms of money or power”.

Therefore, those who embrace the values of this world, he went on, “who frantically seek the key to existence in earthly riches, possessions and amusements”, are unable to find the secret to a good life: to “sacrifice oneself joyfully”.

The theme of mutual coexistence without violence, Pope Francis addressed more directly in a meeting at the university with leaders of other faiths. “Authentic religion is a source of peace and not of violence! No one must use the name of God to commit violence! To kill in the name of God is a grave sacrilege. To discriminate in the name of God is inhuman!” he exclaimed, in a clear reference to the horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

He went on to make a powerful defence of the principle of religious freedom, that “guarantees every other freedom”. Drawing on the recent history of Albania, he pointed out that, until the fall of Communism in 1991-92, the country witnessed “the violence and tragedy that can be caused by a forced exclusion of God from personal and communal life”. “When, in the name of an ideology, there is an attempt to remove God from society, it ends up adoring idols,” he explained.

On Monday, the Pope made his traditional private visit to St Mary Major to thank the Virgin Mary for the success of his visit. The bouquet of flowers he presented to her he had received from the disabled at the Bethany Centre.