Will the bells of the Catholic Church be ignored, once again?

Alfred Lela

The Catholic Church in Albania presented a few days ago a Resolution condemning the crimes and images of communism. While the debate is old, so is the conflict between the Church and Albanian Communism.

It must be understood that the Resolution is not new revenge for old blood, and it must be asked if the threat of communist crimes and images is present in the political and social culture of Albania. The very existence of the debate proves that, YES.

The fact that the clash of civilizations continues shows that resistance to the communist legacy has been incomplete and refractory. By refractory, we mean an affront of this heritage only by one political-ideological wing or only by a part of society.

This happened for several reasons, and almost all of them have to do with the elites of Tirana. Converted into anti-communists overnight, they faced two almost insurmountable difficulties: to fight their heritage and that of the families they came from or, in the political case, to damage electoral prospects in front of a people that, for about 40 years, was framed in a mindset where surrender and brainwashing were combined. Accustomed to the patron and guardian state, a tumultuous population found it difficult to act in conditions of freedom.

The most significant damage in dealing with this legacy was done by the leftist elites who could not accept that their literature, historiography, linguistics, cinematography, a work of four decades, was thrown into the bin of nothingness. It was no longer about the communist heritage but theirs. They had to package their stand, of course, for extrapersonal reasons. Condemning communism, they would criticize their work and lives, so they chose to resist and continue the conflict that arose in Albania during the Second World War.

Not coincidentally, the church that opposes them today appears as part of the gallery of negative characters in films and books before the '90s. The alarm here is not of the generational war because generations are biological. On the other hand, the culture they transmit is sociological and potentially uninterrupted.

What worries the Catholic Church, rightly so, and should do the same with the thinking class (which Albania may or may not have) is the cultural sociology of communism and its image, still ruling in historiography and still unceasing in Kinostudio films of the dictatorship before the 90s.

This apology of communism the cinematographers, historiographers, and culturologists have enabled in Albania lives today not in the periodic and sporadic manifestations of Enver Hoxha's nostalgics but in the insistence of the new regime of the Socialist Party to reincarnate communism through dates, holidays, and events packaged as pop culture. Peza 'n Fest is one example, and White Nights in Tirana is another. The monumentalization of objects related to communism, such as the massive bunkers of the protective and repressive apparatus of Enver Hoxha, transformed into BunkArt 1 and 2, i.e., into soft commercialism, is the most vivid embodiment of this tendency for the brutal dictatorship to be improved in a neutral memory.

On top of the cake of this torture is the bitter cherry of the fact that the Academy of Sciences, for example, is headed by the last Minister of Education of dictatorship.

The Church has the awareness but does not have the means to develop and win this war. It's the only elite who can articulate the concern, but being solo will make it sound out of time and touch. Anyone who knows history knows that the Church sounded the alarm in the 40s when it spoke about the danger of communism—the Catholic clergy was proven right once. It must be said that this time, even though the threat seems imaginary, it is more profound. The means of repression have fallen, and those of spin are born. With them, you can go further, through a gentler path, which no one objects to because everyone lives for the pleasure principle (that which does not make me suffer physically does not exist).

The Catholic Church, however, once again placed itself at the center of this sacrifice and social drama. The clergy of the cross has also raised the voice of conscience for the depopulation of the country, blood feuds, and criminalization of politics.

In a new era where influence, not thought, is at the altar of society, any call to conscience is endangered, at least with disdain. The mob re-elects Barabbas every chance it gets, and the elites are either pressured or indulged.

Bells toll, but only those who think will hear, and all will bear the consequences.