"Long live Christ the King! Long live the Pope! Long live Albania!" — Blessed Dedë Maçaj, shot by the firing squad, March 28, 1947
The First Volley Did Not Kill Him
The execution was in Përmet, in the south of Albania, on March 28, 1947. Dedë Maçaj was twenty-seven years old. He had been a priest for three years. The firing squad raised their rifles and fired.
He did not fall.
He moved forward approximately one meter. He continued to pray aloud. The soldiers, who had witnessed men die by this method before, were so shaken that some of them cried out: He's innocent — save him. The Communist party officials in attendance shouted over them: A bullet in the head! A bullet in the head!
The second shot killed him.
He is not remembered primarily for the drama of the execution — though the drama is real and the witnesses were many. He is remembered because he was twenty-seven years old, had been ordained three years, had been arrested on a charge he could disprove, had been tortured in ways his contemporaries described only as indescribable, had been tried, had been sentenced, and had walked to the firing squad still proclaiming the three loyalties that the Communist state most wanted him to deny: Christ, the Pope, Albania. In that order. Without bitterness, without a word against the men who were shooting him.
The Albanian Communist state had chosen him as a spy for the Vatican. The charge was invented. He had studied in Rome, at the Pontifical Seminary, and had worked with the military chaplaincy. In a state that had made the Catholic Church illegal, these credentials were sufficient for a death sentence. He was not a spy. He was a priest. Those two facts were the whole of his case and the whole of his martyrdom.
Born in Kosovo, Formed in Shkodër and Rome
He was born in 1920 in Kosovo, in the Albanian Catholic community that straddled the modern border between Albania and what would become Yugoslavia. Albanian Catholics had maintained their faith through five centuries of Ottoman rule, through the first and second Balkan wars, through the upheaval of the First World War, and into the interwar period when Albania was briefly a constitutional monarchy and then a republic under Ahmet Zogu.
He was received at the Pontifical Seminary of Shkodër — the major seminary of the Albanian Church, the institution through which the Albanian clergy was formed across generations. His studies were extended to Rome, at the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith — the institution that oversaw the Catholic Church in mission territories and that trained the clergy who would serve in them. He spent the years in Rome, absorbing the theological formation the Church offered and building his knowledge of the tradition that the Albanian Communists would soon declare an enemy of the state.
He was ordained a priest on March 19, 1944 — the feast of Saint Joseph. He was twenty-four years old. He was assigned to serve in the archdiocese of Shkodër-Pult. He worked in the military chaplaincy, which brought him into contact with the machinery of the Albanian state at the moment it was being taken over by Enver Hoxha's Communist partisans.
The People's Socialist Republic of Albania was the most aggressively atheist state in the world. Article 37 of the 1976 Constitution stipulated explicitly that the state recognized no religion and would actively promote atheism. The persecution of the Church began years before that constitution. Between 1945 and 1947 the first wave of executions of clergy and lay Catholics removed the most visible figures from the Albanian Church. Dedë Maçaj was among the first cohort.
He was ordered into military service — a direct assertion of the state's claim on the clergy. He was then arrested on the charge of being a Vatican spy. The arrest was made on the basis of his training in Rome and his connections to the institutional Church, which the state treated as evidence of foreign allegiance rather than religious identity.
The Torture, the Trial, and the Walk to Përmet
What happened between his arrest and his execution the Albanian sources describe only with the word indescribable. Those who documented the 38 martyrs were working from testimonies of survivors, bystanders, and state security archives — and even those archives sometimes had no date of death, because the executions were conducted without formal record. Maçaj's torture was severe enough that the witnesses could not fully narrate it. He bore it without apostasy and without denunciation of his fellow priests.
He was tried. He was sentenced to death. He was transferred to Përmet.
At the moment of execution he said: I die without bitterness or hatred for those who are shooting me. Then he looked at the sky and cried out the three phrases that the soldiers and party officials heard and could not afterwards forget.
The Albanian state awarded the decoration Martyr of Democracy to four of the 38 martyrs in the years after the fall of Communism. Dedë Maçaj was among them. The state that killed him eventually named him a martyr for the values it claimed to represent.
The Church named him a martyr for Christ. Cardinal Angelo Amato beatified him on behalf of Pope Francis on November 5, 2016, in Shkodër, before a crowd that included Catholics and non-Catholics who had come because the martyrs were their history, their neighbors' history, the history of their families under forty years of the most thorough atheist state the modern world produced.
Pope Francis, speaking of the Albanian martyrs, said: They preferred to submit to prison, torture and finally death, in order to remain faithful to Christ and to the Church. May their example help us to find in the Lord strength that supports in moments of difficulty.
Prayer to Blessed Dedë Maçaj
O God, who in Blessed Dedë Maçaj gave Albania a priest who proclaimed Christ, the Pope, and his homeland in the same breath while walking to his execution, grant through his intercession that those who face unjust condemnation may hold the faith as he held it — without bitterness, without negotiation, proclaiming what is true to the moment they are silenced. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Blessed Dedë Maçaj, pray for us.
| Born | 1920 — Kosovo, Albania |
| Died | March 28, 1947 — Përmet, Albania — shot by firing squad; required two volleys |
| Feast Day | March 28 |
| Order / Vocation | Secular clergy — priest of the Archdiocese of Shkodër-Pult; studied at Pontifical Seminary of Shkodër and Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Rome |
| Beatified | November 5, 2016 — Pope Francis (Cardinal Angelo Amato, Shkodër, Albania — one of 38 Blessed Martyrs of Albania) |
| Patron of | Albanian Catholics · Those falsely accused by the state · Priests martyred under Communist regimes |
| Known as | Dedë Maçaj · Dom Dedë Maçaj |
| Their words | "Long live Christ the King! Long live the Pope! Long live Albania!" — spoken at the moment of execution |
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