A Move Toward Christianity Stirs in a Muslim Land

By Free Republic | Created at 2025-01-07 12:41:04 | Updated at 2025-01-10 20:51:09 3 days ago

A Move Toward Christianity Stirs in a Muslim Land
New York Times ^ | 4th January 2025 | Andrew Higgins and Fatjona Mejdini

Posted on 01/07/2025 4:33:15 AM PST by Cronos

Two men chatting in front of a church in the village of Llapushnik, Kosovo, where a baptism ceremony took place in November

The Catholic priest stood at the altar in the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dunking dozens of heads in water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.

Then he rejoiced at Christianity’s recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim — as the men, women and children standing before him had been.

The ceremony was one of many in recent months in Kosovo, a formerly Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93 percent of the population professed itself Muslim and only 1.75 percent Roman Catholic.

A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic kin to look to the church as an expression of their identity. They call it the “return movement,” a push to revive a pre-Islamic past they see as an anchor of Kosovo’s place in Europe and a barrier to religious extremism spilling over from the Middle East.

Until the Ottoman Empire conquered what is today Kosovo and other areas of the Balkans in the 14th century, bringing with it Islam, ethnic Albanians were primarily Catholics. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, most of Kosovo’s people switched faiths.

By reversing that process, said Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who carried out the baptisms outside the village of Llapushnik, ethnic Albanians can recover their original identity.

..“It is time for us to return to the place where we belong — with Christ,” Father Kolaj said in an interview

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...

TOPICS: Catholic; Current Events; General Discusssion; Islam
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1 posted on 01/07/2025 4:33:15 AM PST by Cronos

To: Cronos

Traces of Kosovo’s distant pre-Islamic past also survived in a small number of families that clung to Roman Catholicism despite the risk of being ostracized by their Muslim neighbors.

Marin Sopi, 67, a retired Albanian language teacher who was baptized 16 years ago, said his family had been “closet Catholics” for generations. In childhood, he recalled, he and his family observed Ramadan with Muslim friends but secretly celebrated Christmas at home.

“We were Muslims during the day and Christians at night,” he said. Since coming out as a Christian, he said, 36 members of his extended family have formally abandoned Islam.

2 posted on 01/07/2025 4:35:01 AM PST by Cronos

To: Cronos

Activists in the return movement believe that ethnic Albanians also need to cement their national loyalties with religion in the form of Roman Catholicism.

Boik Breca, a former Muslim active in the movement, insisted that the Catholic church is not an alien intrusion but the true expression of Albanian identity and evidence that Kosovo belongs in Europe.

3 posted on 01/07/2025 4:36:26 AM PST by Cronos

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