the time of the Emperor's accession in 1802, Vietnam had 3 Catholic dioceses with 320,000 members and over 120 Vietnamese priests. The Catholic Church in Vietnam today consists of 27 dioceses organized in 3 ecclesiastical provinces of Hanoi, Hue and Saigon. The government census of 2019 shows that Catholicism, for the first time, is the largest religious denomination in Vietnam, surpassing Buddhism. Ecclesiastical sources report there are about 7 million Catholics, representing 7.0% of the total population. Protestantism Protestantism was introduced to Da Nang in 1911 by a Canadian missionary named Robert A. Jaffray; over the years, he was followed by more than 100 missionaries, members of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, an Evangelical Protestant denomination. The two officially recognized Protestant organizations recognized by the government are the Southern Evangelical Church of Vietnam (SECV), recognized in 2001, and the smaller Evangelical Church of Vietnam North (ECVN), recognized since 1963. Present estimates of the number of Protestants range from the official government figure of 500,000 to claims by churches of 1 million. Growth has been most pronounced among members of minority peoples (Montagnards) such as the Hmong, Ede, Jarai, and Bahnar, with internal estimates claiming two-thirds of all Protestants in Vietnam are members of ethnic minorities. By some estimates, the growth of Protestant believers in Vietnam has been as much as 600 percent over the past ten years. Some of the new converts belong to unregistered evangelical house churches, whose followers are said to total about 200,000. Baptist and Mennonite movements were officially recognized by Hanoi in October, 2007, which was seen as a notable improvement in the level of religious freedom enjoyed by Vietnamese Protestants. Similarly, in October 2009, the Assemblies of God movement received official government permission to operate, which is the first step to becoming a legal organization. The Assemblies of God were said to consist of around 40,000 followers in 2009, the Baptist Church around 18,400 followers with 500 ministers in 2007, and The Mennonite Church around 10,000 followers. Eastern Orthodoxy For Orthodox Christianity, the Russian Orthodox Church is represented in Vũng Tàu, Vietnam, mainly among the Russian-speaking employees of the Russian-Vietnamese joint venture "Vietsovpetro". The parish is named after Our Lady of Kazan icon was opened in 2002 with the blessing of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been given in Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra. The representatives of the foreign relations department of the