Despite growing up in a country and time of harsh religious persecution, Fr. Fred Kalaj still found and fell in love with the Gospel — even to the point of hearing and answering his call to the priesthood.

(0:14) At just fifteen years old, Fr. Fred Kalaj was already pondering life’s toughest questions: why are we here? What is our purpose? What is death, and what comes next? He searched for these answers in the books of great Russian, French, and American authors, but one unexpected text would have all the answers he needed.

(4:11) Fr. Fred talks about the changes the Albanian government began implementing during the 1960s and how churches and towns were repurposed — or just destroyed altogether. Practicing religion in public became a jailable offense.

(10:24) After an earthquake hit Fr. Fred’s town of Shkodra, his brother, who works in construction, found a forbidden book tucked away in the debris of a local home. That book was the Gospel of Matthew, which he gave to Fred to read, and so many of Fr. Fred’s questions finally had answers.

(14:17) Fr. Fred has felt the call to the priesthood, and he found the opportunity to seek asylum away from Albania and work toward his vocation in the United States.

(17:07) Fr. Fred reflects on the graces of reading the Gospels time and time again and the new insight one gleans from each new reading. He talks of his constant prayer to God to make his heart and spirit new everyday, so that his vocation may be more than just a routine job.

Reporting by Dan Meloy; narration and production by Ron Pangborn

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Title: For Love of the Gospel

Narrator: Father Fred Kalaj was 15 years old when he started having some big questions. This is Fr. Fred.

Fr. Fred: It was to me in my head, in my mind and in my heart, they said, what is life? What is life? Why, why we are in this world? What is our purpose? What is a family? What is death? Where we go, what did it happen? You see, there are very, you know, very, very thematic questions that creates a vacuum, you know, in your soul. So I didn't have any response. And they were really bothering me these questions, what is life, especially. What is life? Where we come from, where we will go?

Narrator: These questions weren’t abnormal for someone his age, especially for someone who grew up in an environment without belief systems, creeds, or mentors to encourage free-thinking, but they were particularly risky questions to be asking. Questions the Albanian government at that time didn’t really want people to ask.

Fr. Fred: And they were really bothering me, these questions, what is life, especially. What is life, where we come from, where will go? You know, and in general. And in that time I started reading humanists. I remember I read any book. So there were some forbidden books that hide to friends of my father, so I read Dostoevsky, I remember I read Victor Hugo, I love very much Victor Hugo. A lot of Russians because they have been translated in Albanian. Since Albanian is communist, they have good ties with Russia. So Gogol, you know, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, as I said. All this Russian writers. I remember I was very much impressed by Charles Dickens. You know, and after Hemingway you all these guys here, Mark Twain. I was trying, you know, to pick from things that can respond my fundamental question.

Narrator: There were many books unavailable to him. They’d been confiscated or burned by the government. People had been jailed or punished by death for reading and teaching them. This is because Fred was growing up in Albania, the first atheistic communist country in the world, at the height of its dictatorship. So any questions relating to the spiritual had alarming consequences and Fred was resigned to merely throwing out his endless barrage of questions into the spiritual void. That is until a copy of the Gospel of Matthew literally fell on top of his brother’s head after an earthquake.

One of Fred’s favorite writers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, has a great line in one of his books that says: “If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter him underground.”

Lucky for Fred, his hundreds of parishioners, and the thousands of lives his story has since touched, a tiny old woman in Albania had a similar thought.

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Fr. Fred: Doing little by little, you know, start putting roots in the Albanian putting roots — the communists are putting roots in the Albanian tradition in Albanian people and starting to change, you know, to rapidly change.

Narrator: It started with the bishops.

Fr. Fred: So they called the bishops of the time, four bishops. They put them in a room. They ask them to rewrite the Canon of the Church. And then so after some time, they took some time, and one day you went to report, they said, we wrote carefully the Canon of the Church. It is perfect. Beautiful. We do not see anything to change. So they are all killed. And after they appointed — government itself —appointed some other bishops.

Narrator: And then the seminaries.

Fr. Fred: They closed the seminaries. One day I remember Father [Inaudible], the former pastor of Our Lady of Albanians Church, he told me one morning I was in seminary. He said, the communist party is unscathed, and they said, you have four hours to leave the seminary and go home. If any one of you, you know, disobey this law, would be killed. And then the seminarian who disobeyed, then they were killed, they are martyrs today.

Narrator: And finally came the announcement they were all fearing.

[Albanian]

Narrator: The prime minister, Enver Hoxha, started a violent campaign to extinguish religious practices, scapegoating them as the source of Albanian ethnic divisions and nationwide poverty. He converted all churches, mosques and monasteries into sports arenas, theatres, malls and warehouses. Praying, making the sign of the cross, wearing a crucifix were treated as crimes and could put people in jail. Thousands of Albanians who were perceived enemies of the regime were tortured and killed, or died in detention camps and tens of thousands were arrested. Today the Church recognizes 38 Albanian martyrs to Communism.

Fr. Fred: Churches started being destroyed. Literary, you know, to the foundation is dynamite. Some churches were in good shape. They were converted. Like, for example, St. Steven Cathedral in my city, Shkodra, you know, Northern part of Albania, it is hardly Catholic. It was converted to palace to play basketball, you know? And then the Franciscan church, and another beautiful church and pictures, it was converted to cinema. You know, some other churches in the villages and then in a suburb converted, they called the house of culture. You know, very much it is used for youth to indoctrinate people within propaganda and so on. But most of them, they were totally destroyed.

Fr. Fred: I remember in the time I was in high school, we had to bring religious things in the school. And we were about those hundred students to bring religious crosses, icons books, whatever, and they put in the middle of the court, backyard and they burn it, you know? And then, so this was, you know, started the powerful propaganda. In that moment, our parents were afraid to speak to us about God. So I can say there was the dark, you know, it was the time of darkness.

Narrator: His family’s religious practices became a practice whispered in the shadows of night instead of the point of pride it once was. Because Fred’s dad was an elementary school teacher, it was particularly dangerous for him to talk about God. Teachers who did were often imprisoned or killed. Fred’s uncle had already spent five years in jail as a political enemy of the state and so the religious practices his parents valued were reduced to an “Our Father,” and “Hail Mary” before bed, a whispered “Merry Christmas,” or “Happy Easter” to a friend on the street.

Fr. Fred: They were afraid because you are very young, and young people, they know something, are excited, they might share with their friends, their parents. And you see the word can spread out and then it can come to the ears of government and you can end up in jail or badly persecuted.

Narrator: It was in this spiritual desert that Fred’s existential questions came to the surface. He needed to know, in the absence he was growing accustomed to, the meaning for their life. Or, what he most feared, if there even was a meaning. In the books he pored through he found writers’ words circling that orbited close to the source of truth, but he never uncovered exactly what he was looking for. After high school he went to work in a shoe factory, and then joined the army, as was required by every young man at that time. For several years he was buried in the drudgery of building some of the 500,000 bunkers for the increasingly paranoid Hoxha from an imagined invasion. And then—disaster.

Narrator: Fred’s brother, who worked in construction, was appointed by the neighborhood to go out and investigate the damages and make reports for the government. He entered the home of an elderly woman who’s home was dilapidated.

Fr. Fred: And she had some forbidden books that she hide in a suitcase, in the ceiling. And then because the squeak of the ceiling collapsed and then so the suitcase fell down and it was a wooden suitcase. It was broken, books are spread out a little bit, you know, and then my brother explained me, they'd ended up to some debris. It goes in top. And so when [Albanian] my brother’s name, when he was there, he took a book and he opened the book. It was covered with white paper and it was written the Gospel of Jesus Christ, according to St. Matthew. And it was that it looks very beautiful book, so my brother asked Lucy and said, can I take this book? And she says, can I see it inside, said, “Oh yes, take it. And God bless you.”

Fr. Fred: And then after, he approached me, my older brother and said, Fred, I know that you love books, you know, and then read these books and read this book. Please do read it from the beginning to the end, don't be discouraged. And then after he said, if you do not like the book for my sake, he said, do read it again. And after do whatever you want.

Narrator: Fred read the Gospel. And felt a seismic emotional shift.

Fr. Fred: So I took the Gospel and then I found there, to be honest, every single, you know, question that I was asking and could feel pondering in my heart, you know, I saw in the Gospel. And to be honest, it was unbelievable joy. To me, it looks like the whole skies open like the joy, like the light in myself, and then after I read more than 50 times this Gospel and I, even today, I know by heart a lot.

Narrator: The words of the Gospel felt like a love letter penned specifically for him, for this young man stuck in the misery of a godless nation.

Fr. Fred: And then after little by little I start trying to be, to know more about Christ. You know, self-learn. I didn’t have books, I didn’t have any direction. I just remember very well, about 26, 27, 25 that little by little, start crystalizing in myself the idea to be priest. And I remember one time, it was with my friend, it was a good friend of mine and would you go to seminary, I said, I would enter. And he looked at me and laughed and said, “I would do the same.”

Narrator: But becoming a priest in communist Albania presented considerable hurdles. Anyone who escaped Albania was considered an enemy of the people, meaning their family could be sent to a labor camp. The police would come in the night taking people by trucks and drop them off in a camp in the south of Albania for anywhere from 5-10 years.

Fr. Fred: I have a lot of times had dreams to escape. I took away that idea because I didn't like my family to end up, you know, in these camps.

Narrator: Father Fred and his friend took their chances and swam for seven hours across Lake Shkoder. They arrived at Montenegro at 4 o’clock in the morning.

Fr. Fred: We surrender ourselves to the police and we told them that we left communist Albania seeking for freedom, and it was according to the law, they send us to our court. They give us one month jail.

Narrator: The conditions in jail were awful. Crowded cells, lice, and meager food. When he was released from that jail he spent 3 more months in a refugee camp that was located inside a Belgrade prison before he was helped by the International Refugee Committee. He spent months in a motel while they sought to secure him asylum in the United States where he had a cousin who could sponsor him.

Fr. Fred: You know, by God's Gates. I reached the shores of United States. I landed in New York, my cousin, who was sponsor for me, I lived two months in New York. And after I came in Detroit, because Detroit had two Catholic Churches, Albanian Catholic Church.

Narrator: Fred spent several years working as a painter, sending money home to family members who were still living in Albania, enduring the extreme poverty that a post-Hoxha Albania endured.

Narrator: Several years later, with the help of a Detroit Albanian priest who had been imprisoned with his uncle, Fred enrolled in seminary, and after ten years obtained a doctorate in theology while maintaining a day job at a plastics parts factory in Detroit.

Today Fred Kalaj is “Father” to a vibrant congregation of 2,000 Albanian Catholics at St. Paul’s Albanian Catholic Church in Rochester Hills. Parishioners describe him as an open-hearted pastor and passionate preacher.

Fr. Fred: You know, many times people think that it is the Gospel, it is like a beautiful movie that when you see the hundred times, you have no more excitement. You know, actually the truth, the Gospel, it's something else. Maybe I don't have the excitement, you know, but it is more digestible. You see that it is penetrating in your soul and your mind, and your being. I mean, you know, you see the ritual, you see the excitement, the first excitement. To see that, because they are more — they do digest. You become part of it. I remember, you know, because I read Luke and Mark, you know, here in United States, but the last Gospel that I read, it was St. John. And St. John shocked me, you know, completely. You know, Matthew was amazing. And then many times I was saying, thank you, God, that you gave me this book to read in that age, you know, ended up young. Because I thought that you can, you know, you can lose the whole flavor. When was ordained priest. And after I was saying like this, please, God, give me always a new grace, a new spirit, so my priesthood not be a routine job, but at all times, new, fresh and exciting. You know, I didn't like to be professional. You see like a person that knows everything and then it is like a tape recorder that, you know, just, you go do, you have four or five homilies in your head, and you'll play. So to be honest, especially when they performed the Eucharist, Anointing of the Sick, and the confession, at all times to look at, I preached the first time.

Narrator: For Father Kalaj, this translates to preaching energetically, pacing around the altar, speaking emphatically with his arms, holding the Word like it's still a precious 100-year old copy of the Gospel of Luke that fell from above in an outlawed nation. Though he’s in his sixties, he still speaks with the same euphoric joy of a young disenchanted man who just discovered the meaning of life in a spiritual desert. And for those in the pews, each time he proclaims the Gospel, it’s like hearing it read for the first time.

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This episode is sponsored by Alliance Catholic Credit Union. Learn how “you belong here” at www.AllianceCatholic.com.