ished Decree No. 4337 of the
Presidium of the People's Assembly entitled, "On the Abrogation of
Certain Decrees." Specifically, the new decree annulled all previous
decrees dealing with organized religion, thus removing official sanction
from religious bodies and, in effect, placing them outside the law.

The 1949 decree on religion had provided for subsidies from the state to
the three religious denominations. These subsidies had become
indispensable for their survival because their property and all other
material means of subsistence had been confiscated and nationalized in
1945, and without state help the churches could not function. Concurrent
with the official moves against religions, a number of antireligious
brochures and pamphlets were prepared and distributed by the Democratic
Front in an effort to prepare the people for the attacks on their
religious institutions.

Even though organized religion had been destroyed by the end of 1967,
the regime was still struggling as of early 1970 to eradicate religious
thought and beliefs. The _Nendori_ article that proclaimed the creation
of the first atheist state in the world admitted that "despite the hard
blows religion had suffered through the destruction of its material
institutions, religious ideology is still alive."

Hoxha himself has often admitted that antireligious measures and the
closing of places of worship have not sufficed to eradicate religious
beliefs. Thus, addressing the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Front in
September 1967, he declared that it was misleading to hold that religion
consisted of church, mosque, priests, icons, and the like, and that if
all of these disappeared, then automatically religion and its influence
on the people would vanish. The struggle against religious beliefs, he
added, had not ended because for centuries they had been deeply rooted
in the conscience of the people.

Hoxha reverted to the subject again in his speech to the Party's Central
Committee plenum in June 1969, devoted to reforming the school system,
in which he said that one of the aims of the reorganized schools would
be to bring up the new generation imbued with scientific and theoretical
knowledge; for, according to Hoxha, religious beliefs could be
eradicated only through the elimination of old concepts still prevalent
in the minds of the people.

At the beginning of 1970 Party leaders in their speeches and in the
press were continuing to call for an inte