Martyrs of the Catholic Church
N One of the crimes of the communists in the first days of coming to power was the arrest, imprisonment and murder of clerics on the basis of false accusations and fabricated proof. The Communists also used a ploy. A part of the clergy, who due to the complete lack of evidence, could not be sentenced to capital sentence, were sentenced to imprisonment for quite a few years, but even to them death was reserved in another way: taking them to work in the swamp of death where they drowned alive.
Among the 38 known martyrs from the Vatican, 20 are sentenced to death by shootting and their burial place is still unknown. The Ecclesiastical Court for the Case of the Martyrs in Shkodra, established to review the file of 38 martyrs who were beatified by the Vatican after 9 years of research, proves that during the communist regime in Albania 31 clergymen were shot, 8 others died under torture, 3 murdered without trial, 23 died in prisons and internment camps or shortly after torture, 66 other clerics were released from prison almost dead. The State and State Security archives during the dictatorship were used for this data, while the biggest problem was the lack of data and documentation for many people who were executed without trial. Certificates were found, but the date of death on the day they were executed was not recorded in the registry.
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