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.