A Modern Martyr....who survived

                               

We often think of martyrs as those only who died during the Persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. But there are many modern martyrs among us. Jesuit priest Anton Luli was one of them. From Albania, he was born in 1910, the same year as St Teresa of Calcutta. Back in 1945 he was 35 years old and was made a pastor in a parish. But in 1947 he was arrested by the Communist Government and imprisoned for 45 years. He was tortured, imprisoned, processed and condemned repeatedly, and even spent years working in the Gulag concentration camps in Albania. He was released for a few years, then re-arrested. He spent 9 years in darkness in an underground room. He was condemned to death, but because of his old age, he was given 25 years in prison instead. Then, again in the concentration camps. He was 82 when he was released from prison, but even then, in the remaining 6 years he had to live, he actively worked to rebuild the Catholic church in Albania. Over the past decade, the Albanians even had a Maltese Bishop leading them. In 1996, two years before he died, Pope John Paul invited him to con-celebrate with him at the Vatican. 

This is how he describes an episode of his torture: My first prison was a lavatory located in a mountain village near Scutari. It was the month of December and freezing. I stayed there for nine months forced to squat over hardened feces and without ever being able to lie down given the lack of space. On Christmas eve of that year, they moved me from there and took me to another lavatory on the  second floor, made me undress and hung me from a cord  passing under my arm pits. I was naked and could touch the ground only with the tips of my toes. I could feel my body give way slowly, relentlessly. The cold slowly rose from my body and when it was about to reach my heart I let out a desperate cry. My jailors came at once, took me down and kicked me around all over my body.  That night, in that place and in the solitude of my first agony, I witnessed the real sense of the Incarnation and of the Cross.