Albania’s Two Kinds of Heroes: Mother Teresa and Skanderbeg

A century after the Kings of Assyria carried away the ten Northern Tribes of Israel into captivity, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Greeks settled the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea in the 7th century BC.

One of their major cities was Epidamnos (Dyrrhachium), founded in 625 BC, located in modern-day Albania.

It was there in 48 BC, that Caesardefeated Pompey at the Battle of Dyrrhachium.

Caesar Augustus began incorporating the area, known as the Balkan Peninsula, into the Roman Empire.

The Roman road, Via Egnatia, stretched from Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic Sea to Constantinople, Byzantium, on the Aegean Sea.

The Balkan Peninsula today includes the countries of: Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Romania, Greece, to the borders of Turkey.

When the western Roman Empire fell to barbarians in 476 AD, the Balkan Peninsulasurvived, resisting the siege of Ostrogoth king Theodoric the Great in 481 AD.

In 840, the northern Balkan Peninsula became part of the Christian Bulgarian Empire, which included the area of Albania.

In 1190, Albania became a province in the Christian Byzantine Empire, with its major city of Dyrrhachion on the Adriatic Sea.

In the 1400s, the Ottoman Turkish armycrossed the Bosporus and invaded west.

They attacked Constantinople, Serbia, Morea, Black Sea, Wallachia, Bosnia, Vienna, Karaman, Akkoyunlu, Moldavia, Crimea, and the Balkan Peninsula.

Albania was conquered in 1431, with the local nobility being killed and replaced with Muslim landowners, who imposed exorbitant taxes on the Christian population.

This was followed by periodic massacres of Albanians.

Ottomans led crusades against the Albanian people, with stories of forced conversions and Christian boys taken and forcibly indoctrinated into being Islamic soldiers, or used for pederasty.

Eastern European countries had brave leaders who resisted Islamic invasion:

-Hungary’s John Hunyadi (1406-1456);

-Poland’s Wladyslaw III (1424-1444);

-Moldova’s Stephen the Great (1433-1504);

-Romania’s Vlad III (1428-1477);

-Bulgaria’s Prince Fruzhin (c.1393-1444).

In 1443, the Christian Albanian hero was George Castriot, called “Iskander” or “Scanderbeg,” who led a revolt against the Ottoman Muslims.

American Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized him in the “Poem of Skanderberg”:

“… Anon (soon) from the castle walls

The crescent banner falls,

And the crowd beholds instead,

Like a portent in the sky,

Iskander’s banner fly,

“The Black Eagle with double head;

And a shout ascends on high,

For men’s souls are tired of the Turks,

And their wicked ways and works,

“That have made of Ak-Hissar

A city of the plague;

And the loud, exultant cry

That echoes wide and far

Is: ‘Long live Skanderbeg!'”

For 25 years, Skanderbeg struck fear into the heart of the Ottoman armies.

His 10,000 braves soldiers, often outnumbered in battle, consistently won against larger and better supplied Muslim armies.

Considered a model of Christian resistance, Skanderbeg fought in the Venetian-Ottoman War.

When Skanderbeg died in1468, the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror,exclaimed:

“At last Europe and Asia are mine! Woe to Christendom! It has lost its sword and its shield.”

For the next five centuries, Albania was under Ottoman rule, till Sultan Abdul Hamid II – the 99th caliph of Islam – was deposed in 1909.

There was enthusiasm that Turkey would set up a democratic form of government.

Unfortunately, the joy was short-lived as fundamentalist leaders, called the Young Turks, seized control.

They promoted the idea of re-establishing the caliphate through “Ottomanization” – creating a homogeneous Turkey of one race, one language, and one belief.

The brotherhood of the Young Turks began a genocidal expulsion and extermination of non-Muslim ethnic minorities, including millions of:

Albanians,

Armenians,

Syrians,

Greeks,

Serbs, and

Bulgarians.

In the upheaval of World War I, Albania briefly gained independence in 1912.

It had a few short-lived monarchies, then a republic.

During World War II, Albania was occupied by Fascist Italy, followed by Germany’s National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi).

Albania was a communist State, 1944-1992, during which time it became an officially atheist country.

In 1992, the Republic of Albania was founded.

Many ethnic Albanians lived in the nearby area of Kosovo, the historic center of Christian Serbia and Montenegro.

As Muslims immigrated and increased in number, they took over neighborhoods, and eventually decided to take over the whole region, erupting into the Kosovo War, 1998-1999.

At this same time, in the United States, the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal was breaking, and President Bill Clinton decided to support the Muslim Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as it drove out over one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, leaving the tiny new country with a 96 percent Muslim population.

A statue of Bill Clinton was erected on Bill Clinton Boulevard in the capital of Pristina, Kosovo.

One of the most famous Albanians was the daughter of an Albanian grocer.

Born in 1910, she joined a Catholic religious order at age 18 and began working in the slums of Calcutta, India.

She founded the Missionaries of Charity,and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979.

This was Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Malcolm Muggeridge, a British Journalist who had converted to Christianity, wrote in “The Human Holocaust,” (Human Life Review, 1980):

“Mother Teresa … in Calcutta, goes to great trouble to have brought into her Home for Dying Derelicts, castaways left to die in the streets.

They may survive for no more than a quarter of an hour, but in that quarter of an hour, instead of feeling themselves rejected and abandoned, they meet with Christian love and care …

… Mother Teresa’s … love and compassion reach out to the afflicted without any other consideration than their immediate need, just as our Lord does when He tells us to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked.

She gives all she has to give at once, and then finds she has more to give … Something of God’s love has rubbed off on Mother Teresa.”

Phyllis Schlafly wrote in The Power of the Positive Woman (NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1978):

“Few women in history have ever known the career fulfillment that Mother Teresa has known.

She is the Albanian nun who has made it her mission to minister to the poor and dying in Calcutta, India …

She has become a living legend, acclaimed throughout the world-a career success and a happy woman by any standard. And Mother Teresa has said that men could never equal women in love and compassion.”

Mother Teresa explained:

“Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.”

“God hasn’t called me to be successful. He’s called me to be faithful.”

“If you want to pray better, you must pray more.”

“We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Ronald Reagan wrote in “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation,” (Human Life Review, 1983):

“The revered Mother Teresa, who works in the streets of Calcutta ministering to dying people in her world-famous mission of mercy, has said that ‘the greatest misery of our time is the generalized abortion of children’ …

We can echo the always-practical woman of faith, Mother Teresa, when she says, ‘If you don’t want the little child, that unborn child, give him to me.'”

On February 3, 1994, frail 83-year-old Mother Teresa addressed the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., before an audience of 3,000, including President and Mrs. Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore:

“Jesus died on the Cross because that is what it took for Him to do good to us – to save us from our selfishness in sin …

… The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself,

and if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

The Old Testament version of abortion was sacrificing innocent children to pagan gods.

Proverbs 6:16-17 “The Lord hates … hands that shed innocent blood.”

God is just, and though patient and long-suffering, He will eventually judge individuals and nations who shed innocent blood, unless they repent.

2 Kings 21: “King Manasseh did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites … He sacrificed his own son in the fire (to Moloch) …

The Lord said through his servants the prophets:

“Manasseh … has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him … Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle …

Manasseh also shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem from end to end.”

2 Kings 24:2-4: “The LORD sent Babylonian, Aramean, Moabite and Ammonite raiders … to destroy Judah … because of the sins of Manasseh and all he had done, including the shedding of innocent blood. For he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the LORD was not willing to forgive.”

Urging America to repent, Mother Teresa stated:

“How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? …

We must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us.

So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans or her free time, to respect the life of her child.

The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.

… By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.

And, by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility for the child he has brought into the world. The father is likely to put other women into the same trouble.

So abortion just leads to more abortion.”

Mother Teresa continued:

“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.

Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on.

Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States. These concerns are very good.

… But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers …

We have sent word to the clinics, to the hospitals and police stations: ‘Please don’t destroy the child; we will take the child.’

So we always have someone tell the mothers in trouble: ‘Come, we will take care of you, we will get a home for your child.'”

Mother Teresa spoke further:

“And we have a tremendous demand from couples who cannot have a child …

Jesus said, ‘Anyone who receives a child in my name, receives me.’

By adopting a child, these couples receive Jesus but by aborting a child, a couple refuses to receive Jesus.

Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child.

… I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.

From our children’s home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortion …”

Mother Teresa concluded:

“If we remember that God loves us, and that we can love others as He loves us, then America can become a sign of peace for the world.

From here, a sign of care for the weakest of the weak – the unborn child – must go out to the world.

… If you become a burning light of justice and peace in the world, then really you will be true to what the founders of this country stood for. God bless you!”

Declaring January 22, 2018, National Sanctity of Human Life Day, President Trump stated:

“We focus our attention on the love and protection each person, born and unborn, deserves … Reverence for every human life, one of the values for which our Founding Fathers fought, defines the character of our Nation.

Today, it moves us to promote the health of pregnant mothers and their unborn children … It dispels the notion that our worth depends on the extent to which we are planned for or wanted.

… Science continues to support and build the case for life. Medical technologies allow us to see images of the unborn children moving their newly formed fingers and toes, yawning, and even smiling.

Those images present us with irrefutable evidence that babies are growing within their mothers’ wombs – precious, unique lives, each deserving a future filled with promise and hope.”

On September 5, 1997, just five days after Princess Diana was killed, Mother Teresa died. On September 4, 2016, Pope Francis recognized her as a saint in the Catholic Church.

Albanian Mother Teresa shared what motivated her:

“I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him.

This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve because I love Jesus.”