$Unique_ID{COW00061}
$Pretitle{298}
$Title{Albania
Chapter 5D.   Religion}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Eugene K. Keefe, Sarah Jane Elpern, Willaim Giloane, James M. Moore, Jr., Weston White}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{religious
catholic
church
religion
orthodox
regime
albania
clergy
muslim
bektashi}
$Date{1971}
$Log{}
Country:     Albania
Book:        Albania, A Country Handbook
Author:      Eugene K. Keefe, Sarah Jane Elpern, Willaim Giloane, James M. Moore, Jr., Weston White
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1971

Chapter 5D.   Religion

Situation Before the Communist Takeover

     One of the major legacies of nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule was
the conversion of over 70 percent of the population to Islam. When
independence came, therefore, the country emerged as a predominantly Muslim
nation, the only Islamic state in Europe. No censuses taken by the Communist
regime since it assumed power in 1944 have shown the religious affiliations of
the people. It has been estimated that of a total population of 1,180,500, at
the end of World War II, about 826,000 were Muslims, 212,500 Eastern Orthodox,
and 142,000 Roman Catholics. The Muslims were divided between adherents of the
Sunni branch and over 200,000 followers of a dervish order known as Bektashi,
an offshoot of the Shia branch.

     Christianity was introduced early in Albania, having been brought in
during the period of Roman rule. After the division of the Roman Empire into
East and West in 395, Albania became politically a part of the Eastern, or
Byzantine, Empire but remained ecclesiastically dependent on Rome. When,
however, the final schism occurred in 1054 between the Roman and Eastern
churches, the Christians in the southern part of the country came under the
jurisdiction of the Constantinople Ecumenical Patriarchate. This situation
prevailed until the Turkish invasions of the fourteenth century, when the
Islamic faith was introduced. The apostasy of the people took many decades.

     In the mountainous north the propagation of Islam met strong resistance
from the Catholics. Gradually, however, backwardness, illiteracy, the absence
of an educated clergy, and material inducements weakened resistance. Coerced
conversions occurred, especially when Catholic powers, such as the Venetian
Republic and Austria, were at war with the Ottoman Empire. By the close of the
seventeenth century the Catholics in the north were outnumbered by the
Muslims.

     Large-scale forced conversions among the Orthodox in the south did not
occur until the Russo-Turkish wars of the eighteenth century. Islamic pressure
was put on the Orthodox Christians because the Turks considered them
sympathetic to Orthodox Russia. The situation of the Orthodox improved
temporarily after a Russo-Turkish treaty of 1774 in which Russia was
recognized as the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
The most effective method employed by the Turks in their missionary efforts,
especially in the central and southern parts of the country, was the creation
of a titled noble Muslim class of pashas, beys, and agas (Albanian tribal
chiefs in Turkish service), who were endowed with both large estates and
extensive political and governing powers. Through their political and economic
influences these nobles controlled the peasants, large numbers of whom were
converted to Islam either through coercion or through promise of economic
benefits.

     In the period from independence to the Communist seizure of power, the
Muslim noble class composed the country's ruling elite, but this elite never
interfered with religious freedom, which was sanctioned by the various
pre-World War II constitutions. The church and state were separate. These
constitutions had declared that the country had no official religion, that all
religions and faiths were respected, and that their freedom of exercise was
assured. These provisions had expressed the true feelings of the people who,
whether Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholic, were tolerant on
religious matters.

     Tolerance has been a marked characteristic of all Albanians, as
indicated in part by the fact that even after accepting Islam, many people
privately remained practicing Christians, or so-called crypto-Christians. At
late as 1912 in a large number of villages in the Elbasan area, most men had
two names, a Muslim one for public use and a Christian one for private use. A
characteristic remark on the religious tolerance of the Albanians was made by
Lord Byron, who observed in one of his diaries that elsewhere in the Ottoman
Empire a man would declare himself to be either a Muslim or a Christian when
asked what he was, but the Albanian would reply that he was an Albanian.

Situation Under Communist Rule

     The Communist regime has exhibited in its attitude toward religion a wide
gap between precept and practice. The Communist Constitution, adopted in March
1946 and as subsequently amended, contains liberal provisions with regard to
religion. Freedom of conscience and religion is guaranteed to all citizens;
the church is separate from the state; religious communities are free to
exercise and practice their creeds; it is forbidden to use the church and
religion for political purposes, and political organizations based on religion
are outlawed; and the state may give material assistance to religious
organizations.

     Even before the adoption of the Constitution, however, legislative
measures had already been taken to curb the freedom and power of all religious
bodies. For example, the agrarian reform law of August 1945 made special
provision for the confiscation of all their wealth, especially the estates of
monasteries, orders, and dioceses, and the seizure of their libraries and
printing presses. But the first major law aimed specifically at the control
and regulation of all religious bodies and at the elimination of all
distinguished clergymen was enacted two years after the promulgation of the
Constitution. This law is known as Decree No. 743 On Religious Communities,
approved by the Council of Ministers on November 26, 1949, converted into Law
No. 773 on January 16, 1950, and amended by Decree No. 3660 of April 10, 1963.

     The law provided that religious communities through their activities had
to develop in their followers a sentiment of loyalty toward the People's
Republic of Albania. In order to organize and function, religious communities
had to be recognized by the state, such recognition taking place as a result
of the approval of their statutes by the Council of Ministers. All regulations
and bylaws issued on the basis of such statutes had also to be approved by the
Council of Ministers, and the heads of religious communities and sects had to
be approved by the Council of Ministers after being elected or appointed by
the proper religious organs. Religious communities or branches, such as the
Jesuit and Franciscan orders, that had their headquarters outside the country
were henceforth prohibited and ordered to terminate their activities within a
month of the enactment of the decree.

     All religious communities were obliged to send at once to the Council of
Ministers all pastoral letters, messages, speeches, and other instructions of
a general character that were to be made public in any form. Religious
institutions were forbidden to have anything to do with the education of the
young since this was the exclusive right of the state, and all religious
communities were prohibited from operating philanthropic and welfare
institutions and hospitals or from owning real estate.

     On the basis of Decree No. 743 the Council of Ministers on May 4, 1950,
issued Decrees Nos. 1064, 1065, and 1066, approving respectively the statutes
of the Sunni, Orthodox, and Bektashi religious communities. A common provision
of all three decrees was that each religious community had to develop the
"sentiment of loyalty in their followers toward the people's power and the
People's Republic of Albania, as well as their patriotic feelings." The
Statute of the Independent Catholic Church of Albania was approved by Decree
No. 1322 of July 30, 1951.

     The regime's policy toward each of the three religious denominations,
although differing somewhat in tactics, aimed from the outset at the eventual
destruction of all organized religion. The regime achieved control over the
Muslim faith by dealing with each sect separately. The first measure aimed at
dividing the Sunni and Bektashi, which was effected, officially, in May 1945,
when the two were declared completely independent of each other.

     In dealing with the Sunni clergy, the government arrested and executed as
"enemies of the people" those members of the top hierarchy who were reluctant
to toe the Communist line, while others were imprisoned or sent to
concentration camps. It named as head of the Sunni community Hafez Musa Haxhi
Ali, who in 1950 led a delegation of the Sunni clergy to the Soviet Union,
visiting Uzbekistan and the Muslim religious shrines of Samarkand and Tashkent
and meeting with many Soviet Muslim leaders. He was also used in appeals for
world peace and other slogans directed at the Muslim countries in the Middle
East.

     The policy followed toward each group differed somewhat. The Bektashi
group had always been much more liberal and forward looking than the Sunni.
During the war a few leading Bektashi clergymen had joined the National
Liberation Movement, and three of them-Baba Mustafa Faja Martaneshi, Baba
Fejzo, and Sheh Karbunaro-played major roles in bringing about close
collaboration between the Bektashi order and the regime. In March 1947,
however, Baba Faja and Baba Fejzo were assassinated at the group's
headquarters in Tirana, where they had gone to meet with the World Bektashi
Primate Dede Abazi (the Bektashi had moved their world headquarters in the
1920s from Ankara to Tirana). As the Tirana press reported the event: "The
leaders of the Bektashi, Baba Faja and Baba Fejzo, cooperating with the
people's government, visited Dede Abazi to discuss the democratization of the
religious organization. Dede Abazi answered with bullets, killing them both.
Later he shot himself." Taking advantage of this incident, the regime
eliminated those leaders of the Bektashi clergy it considered disloyal.

     Because of the traditionally nationalistic character of the Albanian
Orthodox Church, the regime has attempted from the outset to use it as an
instrument for mobilizing the Orthodox population behind its policies. Using
the church for its own ends, the regime took steps to purge all those elements
within it that were considered unreliable. Clergymen who did not yield to the
demands of the regime were purged.

     Among the purged Orthodox leaders was the primate of the church,
Archbishop Kristofor Kisi, who was deposed in the late 1940s and subsequently
died in jail. The regime replaced Kisi with Pashko Vodica, a renegade priest
who had joined the ranks of the partisan formations. On assuming the office of
primate, under the name of Archbishop Paisi, he stated that it was the
church's duty to be faithful to the People's Republic of Albania and to the
people's power and added: "Our Church must be faithful to the camp of Peace,
to the great anti-imperialist and democratic camp, to the unique camp of
socialism led brilliantly by the glorious Soviet Union and the Great
Stalin. . . ."

     Archbishop Paisi brought about close ties between the Albanian Orthodox
Church and the Moscow Patriarchate. These ties were further strengthened after
a delegation of Soviet religious leaders, headed by Bishop Nikon of Odessa,
visited Tirana in the spring of 1951. After the 1960-61 Moscow-Tirana break,
however, these ties lapsed.

     The Roman Catholic Church, chiefly because it maintained close relations
with the Vatican and was more organized than were the Muslim and Eastern
Orthodox faiths, became a principal target of persecution as soon as the
Communists assumed power. In May 1945 Monsignor Nigris, the apostolic nuncio
in Albania, was arrested on charges of fomenting anti-Communist feelings and
deported to Italy. In 1946 a number of Catholic clergymen were arrested and
tried on charges of distributing leaflets against the regime; some were
executed, others given long prison terms at hard labor.

     According to Vatican sources, from 1945 to 1953 the number of Catholic
churches and chapels in Albania was reduced from 253 to 100. Both seminaries
in the country were closed, and the number of monasteries dropped from ten to
two. All twenty convents were closed, as were fifteen orphanages, sixteen
church schools, and ten charitable institutions. Both Catholic printing
presses were confiscated, and the publication of seven religious periodicals
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 be-friended 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 that the only religion for an Albanian should
be Albanianism, he assigned the antireligious mission to the youth movement.
By May of the same year religious institutions were forced to relinquish 2,169
churches, mosques, cloisters, and shrines, most of which were converted into
cultural centers for young people. As the literary monthly Nendori (November)
in its September 1967 issue reported the event, the youth had thus "created
the first atheist nation in the world."

     According to Western correspondents in Tirana, the procedure employed in
seizing the places of worship was to assemble the villagers or parishioners in
order to discuss Hoxha's speech and to take measures to eliminate what the
regime referred to as harmful survivals of religious customs. A decision was
then taken to ask the government for permission to close a church, mosque, or
monastery. A few days later the government, stating that it was following the
will of the people, would issue orders to close the house of worship.

     Drastic measures were reportedly taken in cases where the clergy opposed
the government order. The strongest resistance came from the Catholic clergy,
resulting in the detention of some twenty priests. The cloister of the
Franciscan order in Shkoder was set afire in the spring of 1967, resulting in
the death of four monks. The Catholic cathedral in Tirana had its facade
removed, and on June 4, 1967, it was taken over by the government and
converted into a museum. A similar fate befell the Catholic cathedrals in
Shkoder and Durres.

     After the seizure of the houses of worship, the younger clergymen were
forced to seek work either in industry or agricultural collectives. The elder
clergy were ordered to return to their birthplaces, which they could not leave
without permission from the authorities. Monsignor Ernest Coba, bishop of
Shkoder and acknowledged head of the Catholic church in Albania, was evicted
from the cathedral in April 1967 and was forced to seek work as a gardener on
a collective farm. He was still alive but ailing at the end of 1969.

     By the beginning of 1970 the provision of the Constitution concerning
freedom of religion was ostensibly in effect, but government decrees had made
such a provision a dead issue. On November 22, 1967, a significant measure was
taken that apparently aimed at delivering the coup de grace to formal
religious institutions. On that day Gazeta Zyrtare, the government's official
gazette, published 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 plenun 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 intensification of the struggle against
religious ideology and especially for the eradication of every religious
influence or belief among students, who were still under the influence of
parents. The older generation, according to the leadership, continued to
entertain the religious beliefs that everything in nature has been created
with a predetermined purpose by God. The press has also reported on several
occasions that there was strong resistance to the closing of places of worship
and that the clergy resorted to all kinds of subterfuge to continue their
religious activities.