Check this out from The New York Times:
The Catholic priest stood at the altar in the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dunking dozens of heads in water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.
Then he rejoiced at Christianity’s recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim — as the men, women and children standing before him had been.
The ceremony was one of many in recent months in Kosovo, a formerly Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93 percent of the population professed itself Muslim and only 1.75 percent Roman Catholic.
A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic kin to look to the church as an expression of their identity. They call it the “return movement,” a push to revive a pre-Islamic past they see as an anchor of Kosovo’s place in Europe and a barrier to religious extremism spilling over from the Middle East.
Until the Ottoman Empire conquered what is today Kosovo and other areas of the Balkans in the 14th century, bringing with it Islam, ethnic Albanians were primarily Catholics. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, most of Kosovo’s people switched faiths.
By reversing that process, said Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who carried out the baptisms outside the village of Llapushnik, ethnic Albanians can recover their original identity.
Ethnic Albanians, who trace their roots to an ancient people called the Illyrians, live mainly in Albania, a country on the Adriatic Sea. But they also make up a large majority of the population in neighboring Kosovo and more than a quarter of the population in North Macedonia.
At the church where the baptisms took place, nationalist emblems jostle with religious iconography. The double-headed eagle symbol of Albania decorates the steeple and also a screen behind the altar.
“It is time for us to return to the place where we belong — with Christ,” Father Fran Kolaj said in an interview.
In many Muslim lands, renouncing Islam can bring severe punishment, sometimes even death. So far, the baptism ceremonies taking place in Kosovo have stirred no violent opposition, though there have been some angry denunciations online. (It is not known how many conversions have so far taken place.)
