Edmunds Act, the Edmunds–Tucker Act, and the Reed Smoot hearings. The second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915 and launched in the 1920s, persecuted Catholics in both the United States and Canada. As stated in its official rhetoric which focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, the Klan was motivated by anti-Catholicism and American nativism. Its appeal was exclusively directed towards white Anglo-Saxon Protestants; it opposed Jews, blacks, Catholics, and newly arriving Southern and Eastern European immigrants such as Italians, Russians, and Lithuanians, many of whom were either Jewish or Catholic. Warsaw Pact Across Eastern Europe following World War II, the parts of the Nazi Empire which were conquered by the Soviet Red Army and Yugoslavia became one-party Communist states and the project of coercive conversion to atheism continued. The Soviet Union ended its war time truce with the Russian Orthodox Church, and extended its persecutions to the newly Communist Eastern bloc: "In Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, Catholic leaders who were unwilling to be silent were denounced, publicly humiliated or imprisoned by the Communists. Leaders of the national Orthodox Churches in Romania and Bulgaria had to be cautious and submissive", wrote Geoffrey Blainey. While the churches were generally not treated as severely as they had been in the USSR, nearly all of their schools and many of their churches were closed, and they lost their formally prominent roles in public life. Children were taught atheism, and clergy were imprisoned by the thousands. In the Eastern Bloc, Christian churches, along with Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques were forcibly "converted into museums of atheism." Along with executions, some other actions which were taken against Orthodox priests and believers included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals. Current situation (1989 to the present) In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI claimed that Christians were the most persecuted religious group in the contemporary world. In a speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council's 23rd session in May 2013, then-Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations in Geneva, Silvano Maria Tomasi claimed that "an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are violently killed because of some relation to their faith every year". This number was supported by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at the evangelical Gordon–Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, which published a statement in December 2016