Free The Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens Page A

the Vatican, which gave papal imprimatur to the fascist project, the treaty established favorable conditions for the adoption of Roman Catholicism throughout Albania. The Church was permitted to open numerous schools, while the schools run by Greek Orthodox authorities were closed. (Greece took Albania to the World Court on this matter and in 1933 won a landmark case defining the rights of minorities to their own language and religion.) Nor did the advent of the Second World War diminish the enthusiasm of “Greater Albania” for the Axis. Even as Hitler was taking over Athens, a delegation of Albanian notables waited upon Mussolini in order to present him with the crown of Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero.
    A striking fact about this period is the fealty of all Albanian extremists to the idea of “Mother Albania.”When Mussolini finally collapsed, the Albanian Communists, under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, echoed, at a meeting of Albanian political groups that included the fascists, the demand that Kosovo be incorporated into Albania after the war. Tito’s partisans were strong enough and (then) weighty enough in Moscow to negate this demand. But many of Hoxha’s postwar cabinet members were unpurged members of the Albanian Youth of the Lictor, a prewar fascist movement which cherished the idea of military expansion. (Hoxha’s successor as dictator, Ramiz Alia, was one of those who made this bizarre yet seemingly consistent traverse of the political spectrum.)
    Before the war, the ideas of fascism, Catholicism, Albanianism and Albano-Italian unity were closely identified. Afterward, religious identity was officially suppressed by Hoxha’s proclamation of the “world’s first atheist state.” None the less, the evidence implies that irredentist ideology persisted under Stalinist disguise and had at least as much to do with Albania’s foreign-policy alignments as did any supposed doctrinal schism over the canonical texts of Marx and Lenin. An Albanian Catholic nationalist, in other words, might, on “patriotic” questions, still feel loyal to an ostensibly materialist Communist regime.
    How else are we to explain the following entry from the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1990 , published by the Hoover Institution at StanfordUniversity and reviewing developments in all countries of the Communist world?
After numerous previous attempts to secure a visa had been denied, in August the government allowed Mother Teresa to visit Tirana.… Although the visit was called “private,” Mother Teresa was received by Mrs. Hoxha, Foreign Minister Reis Malile, Minister of Health Ahmet Kamberi, the Chairman of the People’s Assembly Petro Dode, and other state and party officials. Dutifully, the Albanian-born nun and Nobel peace prize laureate placed a wreath at the monument of “Mother Albania” and “paid homage and laid a bouquet of flowers on the grave of Comrade Enver Hoxha.” The world-renowned Catholic nun did not utter a word of criticism against the regime for its brutal suppression of religion.
    The “Mother Albania” monument, it might be worth emphasizing, is not an abstract symbol of sentimental nationhood. It is the emblem of the cause of Greater Albania. A nearby museum displays the boundaries of this ambition in the form of a map. “Mother Albania” turns out to comprise—in addition to the martyred province of Kosovo—a large piece of Serbia and Montenegro, a substantial chunk of formerly Yugoslav Macedonia and most of that part of modern Greece now known as Epirus.
    I possess a film of “Mother Teresa” making her homage to “Mother Albania”—as well as to its patron, the pitiless thug Enver Hoxha—and it invites the same question as does the infamous embrace in Haiti: What is a woman of unworldly innocence and charity doing dans cette galère ? Apologists have said, of the Albanian case, that it was only natural for Mother Teresa to make a few obeisances in order to