Posted on 01/14/2022 6:13:32 PM PST by marshmallow
A review of Dom Simon Jubani’s harrowing, inspiring, and occasionally off-putting From the Depths of Hell I Saw Jesus on the Cross: A Priest in the Prisons of Communist Albania.
Although all Communist regimes persecuted religion to varying degrees, nowhere did the anti-religious campaign employ such diabolically creative methods of cruelty, and nowhere was it as fatally thorough, as in Albania. Isolated from the rest of the world during the Cold War quite like North Korea today, few outside the western Balkans and the Albanian diaspora know much about the country’s tragic recent history. Hopefully, the shocking memoirs of Dom Simon Jubani, a Catholic priest who spent twenty-six years in Albania’s Communist prison, will serve as a corrective, even if some fragments will make most readers’ skin crawl.
As a historian who deals with Europe’s twentieth century, especially the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Third Reich as well as the USSR and its Communist satellites, I have read countless unpleasant accounts of human cruelty. However, I can pinpoint the single most disturbing text I have read in my life so far.
In the 2009-2010 academic year, when I was a senior in college, I was reading Robert Royal’s Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century. The chapter I will not forget for the rest of my life is that devoted to Communist Albania. My face grew pale, and I felt nauseous as I read about the torture methods employed against Albanian Jesuits, which included pressing scalding eggs taken directly out of boiling water against their armpits (thus giving them third-degree burns in a highly sensitive place) or slicing open their calf muscles, pouring in salt, and sewing the wounds back together, causing pain that must have been at least as harsh as that experienced during the Crucifixion.
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Courageous Catholic martyrs.
Why so few comments?
Don’t worry. It can’t happen here.
Communists can get away with everything. They can get away with “homophobia” and “islamophobia,” so you know no one will say anything about this.
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