Shtjefën Kurti

Shtjefën Kurti was born on 24 December 1898 in Ferizaj, then in the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire and now in Kosovo, into an Albanian Catholic family. He received early schooling in his native region and pursued priestly studies in Austria and in Rome. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Rome in 1924. He was a diocesan priest, not a member of a religious order. After ordination he returned to Albanian-speaking lands and served in parish ministry in Kosovo and later in Albania, carrying out the ordinary work of a pastor in the interwar decades and during the Second World War.

After the communist regime of Enver Hoxha consolidated power in Albania, the Catholic Church and other religious communities were subjected to systematic repression. Kurti was arrested in 1946 and accused of serving foreign interests, including those of the Holy See, and of opposing the regime’s agrarian policies. He was condemned to death; the sentence was commuted to a long term of imprisonment and forced labor. He spent about seventeen years in prisons and labor camps under the harsh conditions typical of Albania’s political detention system and was released in 1963.

Following his release he was confined to the village of Gurëz, where he was required to work as a laborer. Public religious practice had already been driven underground, and in 1967 Albania proclaimed itself an atheist state and banned religious rites. Kurti continued in secret to offer pastoral care. In 1970 he baptized a child at the request of the family. The baptism was discovered by the authorities. He was arrested, tried on charges that included hostile activity against the state, and sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad on 20 October 1971. Under the communist regime his burial was not publicly honored, and a verified resting place is not established in standard historical accounts.

On 5 November 2016 he was beatified in Shkodër, Albania, together with thirty-seven other Albanian Catholics killed between the mid-1940s and the early 1970s. Cardinal Angelo Amato, then prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided in the name of Pope Francis. The group is commemorated as the Martyrs of Albania, with a liturgical memorial on 5 November. Kurti is remembered as a priest who continued to administer the sacraments after long imprisonment and under a state policy that sought to eradicate religion.