Benedict XVI met with the head of the Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania, and is expressing gratitude for his commitment to foster unity with the Catholic Church. The Pope received Archbishop Anastas of Tirana, Durres and All Albania today in the Vatican.
“Christ’s saving message has borne fruit in your country” from Apostolic times “down to our own day,” the Pontiff acknowledged.
In recent years, the Holy Father affirmed, the “Christians in Albania, both Orthodox and Catholic, kept the faith alive there in spite of an extremely repressive and hostile atheistic regime; and, as is well known, many Christians paid cruelly for that faith with their lives.”
Now, with the fall of this regime, a time of reconstruction is taking place, he noted.
Benedict XVI acknowledged in particular the work of the archbishop, “in the reconstruction of places of worship, the formation of the clergy and the catechetical work now being done, a movement of renewal which Your Beatitude has rightly described as Ngjallja (Resurrection).”
He noted the Albanian Orthodox participation in the international theological dialogue between all Orthodox and Catholics.
VATICAN CITY, DEC. 4, 2009 (Zenit.org)