of Belarus was headed by an ethnic Pole, Cardinal Kazimir Sviontak, who had close ties to the church in Poland. However, despite these ties, Archbishop Sviontak, who had been a prisoner in the Soviet camps and a pastor in Pinsk for many years, prohibited the display of Polish national symbols in Catholic churches in Belarus. Fledgling Belarusian religious movements are having difficulties asserting themselves within these two major religious institutions because of the historical practice of preaching in Russian in the Orthodox churches and in Polish in the Catholic churches. Attempts to introduce the Belarusian language into religious life, including the liturgy, also have not met wide success because of the cultural predominance of Russians and Poles in their respective churches, as well as the low usage of the Belarusian language in everyday life. To a certain extent, the 1991 declaration of Belarus's independence and the 1990 law making Belarusian an official language of the republic have generated a new attitude toward the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Some religiously uncommitted young people have turned to the Uniate Church (Greek Catholic) in reaction to the resistance of the Orthodox and Catholic hierarchies to accepting the Belarusian language as a medium of communication with their flock. Overall, however, national activists have had little success in trying to generate new interest in the Greek Catholic Church. The Greek Catholic Church, a branch of which existed in Belarus from 1596 to 1839 and had some three-quarters of the Belarusian population as members when it was abolished, is reputed to have used Belarusian in its liturgy and pastoral work. When the church was reestablished in Belarus in the early 1990s, its adherents advertised it as a "national" church. The modest growth of the Greek Catholic Church was accompanied by heated public debates of both a theological and a political character. Because the original allegiance of the Greek Catholic Church was clearly to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the reestablished church is viewed by some in the Orthodox Church in Belarus with suspicion, as being a vehicle of both Warsaw and the Vatican and an encouragement of distance from Moscow. Demographics by region In 2017 the religious composition of Belarus was estimated to be as follows by the Generations and Gender Survey and the large sample could allow estimating the religious composition at the regional level. Eastern Orthodoxy is predominant in all over the country, while there is