Newspapers today August 6th,2026

At the age of 97, Cardinal Ernest Simoni, returned to the former prison camp in Albania where he used to offer Mass in secret during his 18 years of sentenced forced labor, offering a public Mass July 31 in the memory of those who suffered and died at the labor camp.

The camp at Spaç, built in 1968 around a copper and pyrite mine in central Albania, was one of the harshest forced-labor prisons run by the country's communist government. Simoni spent much of his 18 years of imprisonment there as a young priest.

Pope Leo XIV sent a letter, read aloud at the close of the Mass, honoring both the cardinal and the many prisoners whose stories were never told.

"No chain is strong enough to imprison a conscience illuminated 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.

The pope called Spaç "one of the most painful chapters" in Albania's national memory, a place "where many carried the heavy cross of injustice."

"The blood of those who suffered and died among those mountains has watered that land, making it a silent witness to fidelity, courage and hope," he said.

"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 God!"

The pope described the cardinal's decision to return to celebrate Mass at the site as a witness to "the Sacrifice of Christ, which transformed the Cross from a sign of death into a promise of life."

On Christmas Eve 1963, Simoni was arrested by the communist regime of Enver Hoxha after offering a Mass for the soul of assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy.