ls ceased.

The ranks of Catholic priests were thinned from ninety-three in 1945 to
ten in 1953, twenty-four having been executed, thirty-five imprisoned,
ten either missing or dead, eleven drafted into the army, and three
having escaped from the country. Secular officials and laymen active in
church affairs also suffered execution, imprisonment, and harassment.

The Catholic school system was completely eliminated. This included five
secondary schools with a total enrollment of 570 and ten elementary and
vocational schools with 2,750 pupils. All Catholic associations were
suppressed.

A severe blow against the Catholic church was struck in 1951, when the
regime mustered a small group of clergymen to hold a national Catholic
assembly to draw the statute for the church. As approved by the Council
of Ministers on July 30 of that year, the statute provided that the
"Catholic Church of Albania has a national character ... [and that] it
shall no longer have any organizational, political, or economic
relations with the Pope." The statute provided further that the church
was to be directed both in religious and administrative matters by a new
Catholic Episcopate, that relations concerning religious questions
could be established only through governmental channels, and that the
church would submit to the canon law of the world Catholic church only
if the provisions of this law did not contradict the laws of the
People's Republic of Albania.

Enver Hoxha himself spearheaded the campaign against the Catholic
church. In 1952, for example, he purged Tuk Jakova, the only Catholic
member of the Politburo and previously one of Hoxha's closest
collaborators, because he had allegedly befriended the Catholic clergy.
In his speech to the Second Party Congress in 1952, in an attempt to
justify Jakova's purge, Hoxha said: "Comrade Tuk Jakova, in
contradiction to the political line of the Party and of the state
concerning religion generally and the Catholic clergy in particular, has
not properly understood and has not properly acted against the Catholic
clergy. Without seeing the great danger of the reactionary clergy,
Comrade Tuk Jakova has not hated them in sufficient measure...."

A new policy aimed at the complete destruction of organized religion was
enunciated by Hoxha in a speech to the Party's Central Committee on
February 6, 1967. Calling for an intensified cultural-education struggle
against religious beliefs and declaring tha