a strong Catholic minority in the western part of the country making up the 6.7% of the total population and the 32.3% of the population in the Grodno Region. Many Catholics in Belarus belong to minority ethnic groups such as Poles (who make up the 3.1% of the total population according to the most recent 2009 Census), but include many ethnic Belarusians as well. Statistics Before 1917 Belarus had 2,466 religious communities, including: 1,650 Orthodox, 127 Catholic, 657 Jewish, 32 Protestant, and several Muslim communities. Under the communists, the activities of these communities were severely restricted. Many religious communities were destroyed and their leaders exiled or executed; the remaining communities were sometimes co-opted by the government for its own ends, as in the effort to instill patriotism during World War II. In 1993 one Belarusian publication reported the numbers of religious communities as follows: 787 Orthodox, 305 Catholic, 170 Pentecostal, 141 Baptist, 26 Old Believer, 17 Seventh-Day Adventist, 9 Apostolic Christian, 8 Greek Catholic, 8 New Apostolic, 8 Muslim, 7 Jewish, and 15 other religious groups. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey based on a sample of 1000 people found that 94% of them declared to be Christians, 3% to be irreligious—a category which includes atheists, agnostics and those who described their religion as "nothing in particular", while 3% belonged to other faiths. The Christians were divided between 73% who declared to be Eastern Orthodox, 12% Catholics, and 9% other Christians. Religious groups Christianity Eastern Orthodoxy Although the Russian Orthodox Church was devastated during World War II and continued to decline until the early 1980s because of government policies, it underwent a small revival with the onset of perestroika and the celebration in 1988 of the 1,000- year anniversary of Christianity in Russia. In 1990 Belarus was designated an exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, creating the Belarusian Orthodox Church. In the early 1990s, 60 percent of the population identified themselves as Orthodox. The church had one seminary, three convents, and one monastery. Catholic Church Soviet policies toward the Catholic Church were strongly influenced by the Catholics' recognition of an outside authority, the pope, as head of the church, as well as by the close historical ties of the church in Belarus with Poland. In 1989 the five official Catholic dioceses, which had existed since World War II and had been without a bishop, were reorganized into five dioceses (covering