The Albanian Catholic story usually begins with Skanderbeg and runs through Pjetër Bogdani and Mother Teresa. There is another thread most American readers miss: a pope of Albanian descent who held the chair of Peter for 21 years and used the office to protect the language his great-grandparents spoke. His name was Giovanni Francesco Albani, and the world knew him as Clement XI.
This is a survey of the popes and cardinals who carry an Albanian connection through Vatican history. The headline figure is Clement XI (1649–1721). The supporting figures range from a 7th-century pope whose Albanian attribution is contested, to a 21st-century cardinal who survived 18 years in Communist Albania’s prisons. Together they form a quiet lineage that Albanian-American Catholic families inherit whether they realize it or not.
We will be honest where the evidence is honest. Some claims about Albanian popes are well-documented; others are contested. Where popular tradition outruns the historical record, we will say so. The point is not to inflate the count but to lay out what is actually known and what it means for a diaspora reader sitting in metro New York, Detroit, or Boston with a parish in their family tree.
The Albani family and Albanian descent
The Albani were a noble family in the central Italian city of Urbino by the 15th century. Their surname is the clue. Albani — “the Albanians” in Italian — is exactly what neighbors would have called a family of recent arrivals from across the Adriatic. The family tradition, repeated in genealogies of the line, traces the original ancestors to the highlands of northern Albania, specifically the Malësia (the highlands) region, under the surname Laci or Lazi before Italianization.
The most plausible date for the family’s move is the second half of the 15th century, the same window when waves of Albanian Catholics crossed the Adriatic ahead of the Ottoman conquest. That wave also produced the Arbëreshë communities still living in southern Italy and Sicily today (see our Arbëreshë piece). The Albani settled north of those communities, in the Marche, where they integrated into the local nobility within a generation or two.
By the mid-1600s the Albani were a Urbino patrician family with property, education, and a track record of producing senators and clergy. They were not, by then, an immigrant family in any practical sense — they spoke Italian, lived as Italians, and married into Italian houses. But the family memory of Albanian origin persisted, and the future Pope Clement XI did not hide it. He used it.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the family produced several cardinals beyond Clement XI: Annibale Albani (1682–1751), Clement XI’s nephew, a cardinal and major art patron; Alessandro Albani (1692–1779), another nephew, who built the Villa Albani in Rome and assembled one of the great Italian antiquities collections; and Giuseppe Albani (1750–1834), a 19th-century cardinal who served as papal Secretary of State. The Albani contributed disproportionately to Vatican administration for nearly two centuries.
Pope Clement XI: papacy and persona (1700–1721)
Giovanni Francesco Albani was born in Urbino on July 23, 1649. He was educated by the Jesuits and the Roman College, took minor orders early, served as secretary of papal briefs, and rose through the curia under three popes before his own election. He was created cardinal in 1690 by Pope Alexander VIII at age 41. He was not ordained a priest until September 1700, two months before his election as pope — a reminder that high curial office in that era did not require prior priestly orders.
The conclave that elected him followed the death of Pope Innocent XII. Albani was elected on November 23, 1700, and chose the name Clement XI. He was 51, comparatively young for the chair, and he held it for over twenty years. He died on March 19, 1721.
The early reign was dominated by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), a continent-spanning conflict over who would succeed the last Habsburg king of Spain. Clement XI tried to keep the Papal States neutral and failed, getting boxed in by both the French Bourbon and Austrian Habsburg sides at different points. The political record of his papacy is mixed. The cultural and institutional record is stronger.
He was a serious patron of learning. He expanded the Vatican Library, acquired major manuscript collections, and supported Oriental studies including Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, and Albanian materials. He founded or strengthened several Roman colleges training missionary clergy for the eastern Mediterranean. He confirmed the cult of several Catholic martyrs and saints. And, crucially for our purposes, he gave his personal patronage to the Albanian Catholic Church in a way no pope had before and few since.
He did not visit Albania — popes did not travel in that era. But he sent representatives, funded the Albanian clergy in Rome’s Collegio di Propaganda Fide, corresponded with Albanian bishops, and put Vatican money behind the Albanian Council we will turn to next.
The Albanian Council of 1703 (Kuvendi i Arbënit)
The single most consequential thing Clement XI did for Albanian Catholicism is the synod usually called the Kuvendi i Arbënit — the Council of Arbën, or in English the Albanian Council. It met in January 1703 in the highlands of northern Albania. The standard location given is the area of Mërqinjë (sometimes spelled Mërçinjë or Mërqia) near Lezhë, though the surviving documentation describes a synod that moved across more than one site.
The council was convoked under Clement XI’s authority and presided over by Vincenzo Zmajević, then Archbishop of Antivari (Bar, in present-day Montenegro), as apostolic visitor. Around 30 Albanian Catholic clergy attended, including bishops and abbots from the dioceses of Shkodër, Lezhë, Sapë, Pult, Durrës, and the surrounding sees. The pope’s instructions were clear: assess the state of Catholic life in Albanian lands under Ottoman rule, codify discipline, and protect the faithful from forced conversion.
The council produced a set of decrees in both Latin and Albanian, published in Rome in 1706 as Concilium Albanum. The Albanian-language portions of these decrees are among the earliest sustained ecclesiastical texts in the language. For comparison, Gjon Buzuku’s Meshari (the first printed Albanian book) had appeared 148 years earlier in 1555, and Pjetër Bogdani’s Cuneus Prophetarum in 1685. The Council’s decrees take their place in that small but load-bearing shelf of early written Albanian.
What did the council actually decide? It standardized parish administration, regulated marriage and baptism practice, condemned the crypto-Catholic practice of outward Islam paired with secret Catholic life (a survival strategy the council viewed as spiritually dangerous), set norms for clergy training, and committed the Albanian Church to teach in Albanian where possible. That last point matters. It made the Catholic Church one of the few institutions in 18th-century Albanian lands actively using the local language for written instruction.
For Albanian Catholic Americans, the Council of Arbën is the institutional memory of a moment when the Vatican leaned in. The pope who funded it was of their own ancestral stock; the bishops who attended it were from the same highlands where many American family trees end; the language it preserved is the language those families still pass to their children.
Patronage of Albanian language and scholarship
Clement XI’s interest in Albania was not a one-time gesture. Across his 21-year papacy he sustained a pattern of patronage that touched language, scholarship, and clergy training.
He supported the Albanian college within the Collegio di Propaganda Fide, the Vatican school where Catholic clergy from missionary regions trained for ordination. Several generations of northern Albanian and Arbëresh priests passed through Propaganda Fide in this period, returning home with theological training, working knowledge of Latin and Italian, and the contacts to keep their parishes supplied with books and sacramental materials.
He patronized scholarship in Albanian. The most-cited example is his support for the work of his contemporaries and successors documenting Albanian language and history — the period sees a wave of grammars, dictionaries, and translated catechisms produced by Albanian Catholic clergy with Vatican backing. Francesco Maria da Lecce’s Dictionarium Latino-Epiroticum (an early Latin–Albanian dictionary), published in 1702, falls in this same window.
He added Albanian-language and Albanian-related materials to the Vatican Library, where his expansion of the collections is a documented part of his legacy. Codices, manuscripts, and printed books touching the Albanian Church and the broader Illyrian world entered the Vatican’s holdings during his reign and remained.
A note of honesty on the popular phrase “Vatican Library’s Albanian collection.” There is no single hall labeled “Albanian collection.” What exists is a body of Albanian-related manuscripts and printed works gathered into the library over centuries, with significant additions in the Clement XI period. Albanian-American researchers can request access to the Apostolic Library’s catalogues like any other researcher, and modern digitization has made portions of the holdings searchable online.
Earlier and contested attributions: Pope John IV
Some Albanian sources, especially in older diaspora media, claim Pope John IV (papacy 640–642) as a pope of Albanian origin. This claim needs careful handling.
What the historical record actually says is that John IV was born in Dalmatia, the Adriatic coastal region that today spans parts of Croatia and Montenegro and historically extended into what is now northern Albania. His father, Venantius, was a scholasticus (a legal expert), and John IV is known for organizing the ransom of Christian captives from his Dalmatian homeland during the Slavic and Avar incursions of the 7th century. He commissioned the Oratory of Saint Venantius in the Lateran Baptistery in Rome and decorated it with mosaics depicting Dalmatian and Istrian saints.
The question is whether “Dalmatian” in the 7th-century sense overlaps with what later became “Albanian.” Pre-Slavic Dalmatia was inhabited by Illyrian peoples, the same broad ancestry from which the Albanians descend. Some Albanian historians and diaspora writers therefore frame John IV as part of the wider Illyrian–Albanian lineage. Mainstream Vatican and historical references, however, identify him as Dalmatian, not Albanian in the modern ethnic sense.
The honest framing: John IV may share deep Illyrian ancestry with the Albanians, but calling him “an Albanian pope” in the same way Clement XI was is a stretch the documentary record does not support. Some Albanian sources make the claim; readers should know it is contested and not treat it as settled.
Other occasionally-mentioned attributions — to popes from the late Roman period or from medieval families with Balkan connections — fall in the same category. The well-documented case for an Albanian pope is Clement XI. Everything else is genealogical speculation that the surviving sources do not confirm.
The Albanian martyrs and Cardinal Simoni today
If Clement XI is the headline historical figure, the headline living figure is Cardinal Ernest Simoni.
Born in Troshan, near Lezhë in northern Albania, on October 18, 1928, Simoni was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1956. Two years later the Communist regime arrested him on Christmas Eve 1963, charged him with subversive activity, and sentenced him to death. The sentence was commuted to forced labor; he served 18 years in Communist prisons and labor camps, working in mines and sewage systems, continuing to celebrate Mass in secret with smuggled wine and pieces of bread.
He survived. After the 1990 collapse of Albania’s atheist state he resumed open ministry. Pope Francis met him in Tirana on September 21, 2014 during the visit covered in our Pope Francis in Albania piece, and was visibly moved by his testimony. Two years later, on November 19, 2016, Pope Francis created him a cardinal at age 88 — the first cardinal from within Albania itself. He continues to live in Italy and to speak publicly about religious freedom and the Communist-era persecution.
Simoni’s elevation is part of a wider Vatican recognition of Albanian Catholic suffering under Communism. On November 5, 2016, two weeks before Simoni was named cardinal, Pope Francis beatified 38 Albanian martyrs of the Communist era at a ceremony held in Shkodër. The list includes Archbishop Vinçenc Prennushi of Durrës (died under torture, 1949), Bishop Frano Gjini of Lezhë (executed 1948), and 36 other priests, religious, and laypeople killed for their faith between 1945 and 1974.
For Albanian-American Catholic readers, Simoni and the 38 martyrs are the present-tense end of a story that runs from Clement XI to the Council of Arbën to Bogdani’s catechisms in Albanian, through the Ottoman survival of the Catholic highlands, through Hoxha’s prisons, and out the other side. The lineage is not abstract. It is alive in the cardinal’s biography and in the names of 38 people the Church now venerates publicly.
What this lineage means for Albanian-American Catholics
Most Albanian-American Catholic families landed in metro New York, northern New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, and Massachusetts across the last century, in waves shaped by Ottoman collapse, two world wars, the Communist takeover, and the post-1990 opening. The family stories tend to be specific and local — a village near Shkodër, a parish in Mirdita, a baptism in Pristina, a wedding in Hartsdale.
The Vatican thread sits behind those local stories. When an Albanian-American family attends Mass at Our Lady of Shkodra (Zoja e Shkodrës) in Hartsdale, New York, or at the Albanian Catholic communities in Waterbury, Detroit, or Sterling Heights, the rite they participate in connects directly to the work Clement XI funded. The Albanian-language pastoral norms set at the Council of Arbën are part of why an Albanian-language homily in a US parish is not a 21st-century innovation but a 300-year-old tradition. The catechism of the Albanian children in a parish basement on a Saturday morning traces back to the Catholic schools Propaganda Fide trained clergy to staff in the 1700s.
A few specifics for readers who want to take the thread further:
- The Vatican Apostolic Library in Rome holds Albanian materials from the Clement XI period and later. Researchers can request access. Modern digitization continues to expand what is accessible online.
- Cardinal Simoni’s published memoirs (in Italian and Albanian) describe the prison years in detail and are an unusual primary source for what Albanian Catholic life looked like underground.
- The 38 beatified martyrs have a published list with biographical sketches available through the Albanian Catholic dioceses and the Vatican; the November 2016 beatification ceremony is well-documented in Catholic press from that period.
- Albanian Catholic family records in northern parishes (Shkodër, Lezhë, Sapë, Pult, Mirdita) often reach back to the 1700s and occasionally earlier — the same century Clement XI was strengthening the diocesan structure that kept those records possible. See our piece on the Albanian Catholic Church for the parish-records angle.
The lineage is not exclusive. The Albanian Orthodox tradition, the Sunni Muslim tradition, the Bektashi Sufi tradition, and the secular Albanian tradition each carry their own threads that NAR also speaks to. But for the Albanian-American Catholic reader specifically, the Albani pope is a piece of family history most never learned in school. It deserves to be on the shelf with Mother Teresa, Skanderbeg, and Bogdani.
Get counted alongside your Albanian Catholic community
The Albanian Catholic thread in American Catholic life — from an 18th-century pope of Albanian descent to a 21st-century cardinal — deserves to be counted in full. If you carry that heritage, add yourself to the National Albanian Registry. The certificate is a recognition document marking your place in the Albanian-American community; it is not a government ID or a citizenship document, but it is yours.