"The divine call in the time of dictatorship!" The story of Archbishop Joan Pelushi and his friendship with Rama

A few days after his enthronement as head of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania, Archbishop Joan Pelushi was today invited to Prime Minister Edi Rama's "Flasim" Podcast. In a rare confession, the archbishop told how his desire to become a priest arose at an unimaginable time in the 1980s, when our country was still under communist dictatorship.

Prime Minister Edi Rama recalled the conversations with Archbishop Joan Pelushi held on the streets of Myslym Shyri in Tirana during the dark years of the dictatorship, when freedom of religion was a distant dream, as the latter expressed his desire to become a priest. 

"In those days, no one thought that one day we would be able to go out into the free world and practice our faith," Rama said, indicating that it was precisely the Archbishop who, with unwavering conviction, had told him: "I will become a priest."

In a conversation full of sensitivity and spiritual depth, Archbishop Pelushi shared that he had grown up in a non-religious family and that in his youth he had embarked on an inner journey through reading, recalling that reading the Gospel in his fourth year of high school restored the joy of childhood and changed his life forever.

"I come from a very large and non-Christian family, at that time no faith was practiced. It was not conversion, nothing existed. In my youth I liked to read endlessly. Man is a thirsty being, but it depends on what water he drinks. When I read the Gospel for the first time, in the 4th year of high school, something happened deep inside me. The joy of childhood returned to me. I thanked God for giving me back my joy. At that moment my life changed. I was lucky to meet people who had access to even more advanced books. And together with Petro Zheji, we almost read the entire library on Elbasan Street and there were valuable books. And we realized this later when we went abroad to Italy and America. At the school I went to, I saw that I had read most of the books. The conviction to become a priest was born then."

But he remembers a verse from the book of Revelation that has served as a guide on his holy path.

"There are some beliefs that you can't explain rationally. At that time, becoming a priest was unthinkable. But a verse from Revelation stuck in my mind: 'I am the one who opens and no one shuts.' And I saw it as something personal." (A2 Televizion)