Archdiocese of Tirana-Durrës

	Archdiocese of Tirana-Durrës
Basic data
Country	Albania
Diocesan bishop	George Anthony Frendo OP
Auxiliary bishop	Arjan Dodaj (appointed)
surface	2,263 km²
Parishes	19 (2014 / AP 2015 )
Residents	1,206,000 (2014 / AP 2015 )
Catholics	135,400 (2014 / AP 2015 )
proportion of	11.2%
Diocesan priest	10 (2014 / AP 2015 )
Religious priest	29 (2014 / AP 2015 )
Catholics per priest	3,472
Friars	33 (2014 / AP 2015 )
Religious sisters	110 (2014 / AP 2015 )
rite	Roman rite
Liturgical language	Albanian
cathedral	St. Paul's Cathedral (Tirana)
Co-cathedral	St. Lucia Cathedral (Durrës)
address	Bulevard Xhan d'Ark ; Tirane ; Shqiperia
Suffragan dioceses	Diocese of Rrëshen ; Apostolic Administration for Southern Albania

St. Paul's Cathedral in Tirana

The Archdiocese of Tirana-Durrës ( Albanian Kryepeshkopata Tiranë-Durrës ; Latin Archidioecesis Tiranensis-Dyrracena ) is one of two Roman Catholic Archdioceses in Albania and has its seat in Tirana .

history

Durrës (Greek Dyrrachion) is considered to be one of the oldest bishoprics in the world. According to ecclesiastical tradition, the apostle Paul spread Christianity to Illyria and installed the first bishop in Dyrrachion. There is evidence that the Metropolitans of Durrës participated in several of the ecumenical councils . Unlike most of the Illyrian bishoprics, Dyrrachion did not perish in the storms of the Great Migration . The jurisdiction between the Pope in Rome and the Patriarchs of Constantinople had been disputed since the Middle Ages. After the schism of 1054, depending on the power-political situation, sometimes Latins and sometimes Greeks officiated as Archbishop of Durrës. Around the 13th century, the two churches developed separate hierarchies. Since then there has been an Orthodox metropolitan as well as a Catholic archbishop who reports directly to the Holy See .

Episcopal residence in Delbenisht around 1912

After the Ottomans took Durrës in 1501, the archbishopric was vacant for a long time or its owners resided abroad or in the mountains of Albania in the Kurbin region , as the Ottoman authorities only allowed Catholic bishops to exercise their office in rare cases. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that Catholics had equal status with Orthodox Christians in this regard, and the archbishop was able to reside in Durrës again, whereupon the St. Lucia Cathedral was built. In Delbnisht, a village near Laç , the archbishop had a summer residence until the First World War, and the church there was also called a cathedral; the Turks continued to call the archbishop Bishop von Kurbin . At that time large parts of today's Albania belonged to the archbishopric, in the north up to the river Mat , in the south over the modern border to Ioannina and Preveza in northern Greece ; In the large area there were only 19 parishes in 1890 and the Catholics made up less than 10% of the population and, along with the majority Muslims and Orthodox , were not even present in many places.

If Tirana was a small town with an almost exclusively Muslim population until the beginning of the 1920s, this changed when it became the capital of Albania. Catholics also moved there, and the Jesuits built a large parish church. 1920–1926 and 1936–1938, the Holy See was present with an Apostolic Delegate in Tirana. However, the port city of Durrës remained the seat of the Archbishop until after the Second World War.

After the end of the war, the communists arrested Archbishop Vinçenc Prennushi , who had been in office since 1940 . He was tortured and sentenced as an enemy of the people by a military court in Durrës to twenty years in prison and forced labor. Weakened by torture and imprisonment, he died in prison in 1949. Thereafter the archdiocese was without orderly leadership until the end of communism. In 1958, the Holy See appointed Nikollë Troshani († 1994), an apostolic administrator, who was secretly ordained and was nevertheless imprisoned for decades shortly afterwards. Troshani was the only Albanian bishop to see the end of the communist regime. When the ban on religion was imposed in Albania in 1967, the Archdiocese of Durrës virtually no longer existed.

After the fall of the communist regime in 1990, the church hierarchy and administration had to be completely rebuilt. The archbishopric was rebuilt by Pope John Paul II in 1992 with the name Durrës-Tirana and expanded to include part of the territory of the former Orosh Territorial Abbey. The Apostolic Administrator Troshani resigned that same year. Rrok Mirdita became the new archbishop at Christmas 1992. In 1996 some areas in the north were separated again, which came to the newly founded diocese of Rrëshen. On January 25, 2005, Pope John Paul II elevated the diocese of Tirana-Durrës to an archbishopric with the seat of a metropolitan with the Apostolic Constitution Solet Apostolica Sedes , to which the diocese of Rrëshen and the Apostolic Administration for Southern Albania are subordinate as suffragan dioceses .

Bishops

literature

Anuari i Arkidioqezes Tiranë-Durrës. 1995 ff.
Markus WE Peters: History of the Catholic Church in Albania 1919–1993. Wiesbaden 2003. ISBN 3-447-04784-4 .

Web links

Commons : Archdiocese of Tirana-Durrës - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Kisha dhe jeta (website of the metropolitan; Albanian)
Robert Elsie: The religious communities among the Albanians (PDF file; 123 kB)
Entry on the Archdiocese of Tirana-Durrës on catholic-hierarchy.org

Individual evidence

↑ Rom 15:19: So I brought the gospel of Christ everywhere from Jerusalem to Illyria.
↑ Engelbert Deusch: Das k. (U.) K. Cultural protectorate in the Albanian settlement area in its cultural, political and economic environment (= To the customer of Southeast Europe . Volume II / 38 ). Böhlau, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78150-9 , pp. 154, 205 .
^ Karl Otten : The journey through Albania and other prose . Ed .: Ellen Otten, Hermann Ruch. Arche, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-7160-2085-0 , p. 55, explanations on p. 186 (new edition of the travelogue from 1912 published in 1913).
↑ Engelbert Deusch: Das k. (U.) K. Cultural protectorate in the Albanian settlement area in its cultural, political and economic environment (= To the customer of Southeast Europe . Volume II / 38 ). Böhlau, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78150-9 , pp. 98 f .

[1] Rom 15:19: So I brought the gospel of Christ everywhere from Jerusalem to Illyria.

[:3-2] Engelbert Deusch: Das k. (U.) K. Cultural protectorate in the Albanian settlement area in its cultural, political and economic environment (= To the customer of Southeast Europe . Volume II / 38 ). Böhlau, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78150-9 , pp. 154, 205 .

[3] Karl Otten : The journey through Albania and other prose . Ed .: Ellen Otten, Hermann Ruch. Arche, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-7160-2085-0 , p. 55, explanations on p. 186 (new edition of the travelogue from 1912 published in 1913).

[4] Engelbert Deusch: Das k. (U.) K. Cultural protectorate in the Albanian settlement area in its cultural, political and economic environment (= To the customer of Southeast Europe . Volume II / 38 ). Böhlau, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78150-9 , pp. 98 f .