The Church in Albana has 491,870 Catholics, or 16.4% of the total Albanian population of 3,002,392, according to statistics in the new (2025) edition of the Annuario Pontificio [Pontifical Yearbook], published by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Remarkably, one diocese (the Diocese of Lezhë) has the majority of the nation’s seminarians.

“Palliative care is the only right response to the trying situations of the end of life,” the bishops wrote on January 14. “Legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide would profoundly change the nature of our social pact.”

Criticizing the misuse of the words dignity, freedom, and fraternity, the prelates said that “the dignity of a human person does not vary according to his or her state of health, autonomy or social utility; it is inherent in his humanity, to the end. It is inalienable.”

The prelates added:

To evoke a “law of fraternity” when it is a question of causing death, of giving the possibility of administering a lethal substance, or of inciting a caregiver to do so against his conscience, is a lie.

Fraternity, the central value of our Republic, does not consist in hastening the death of those who suffer or in forcing caregivers to cause it, but on the contrary in never abandoning those who live through these difficult and painful moments. Fraternity invites us to definitively refuse the temptation to cause death, and, at the same time, to make a resolute commitment to effectively develop palliative care throughout the land, to strengthen the training of caregivers, to support caregivers, to breach solitude, and to recognize that vulnerability is part of the human condition.

A Vatican official took stock of the past year’s developments in Jewish-Catholic relations and focused on the commemorations of the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate.