A cardinal sympathetic to the Traditional Mass alongside Leo XIV in the Urbi et Orbi blessing

The image has not gone unnoticed. Alongside Pope Leo XIV, in the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica during this Easter Sunday’s Urbi et Orbi blessing, was Cardinal Ernest Simoni, one of the most moving figures in the current College of Cardinals and a man whose biography encapsulates like few others the persecution against the Church in the 20th century.
Simoni does not represent just any sensitivity within the Church. His life was marked by the repression of the Albanian communist regime, which kept him in prison and forced labor for many years for faithfully exercising his priesthood. In his figure is concentrated the memory of a faith lived under threat, tested in suffering, and maintained without fanfare but with extraordinary firmness. His mere presence alongside the Pope, precisely in a blessing centered on peace, violence, and the suffering of peoples, acquired evident symbolic force thereby.
It is not just a matter of a survivor of persecution, but also of a cardinal …