Religion in Ukraine
As of 2018, according to a survey held by the Razumkov Center, 71.7% of the total respondents declared to be believers, while 11.5% were uncertain whether they believed or not, 5.3% were uninterested in beliefs, 4.7% were unbelievers, 3.0% were atheists, and a further 3.7% found it difficult to answer the question. A 2018 survey conducted by the Razumkov Centre found that 71.7% of the population declared themselves believers. About 67.3% of the population declared adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity (28.7% of the Kiev Patriarchate, 23.4% just Orthodox, 12.8% of the Moscow Patriarchate, 0.3% Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and 1.9% other types of Orthodoxy), 7.7% just Christians, 9.4% Greek Rite Catholics, 2.2% Protestants and 0.8% Latin Rite Catholics. Judaism was the religion of the 0.4%; while Buddhism, Paganism and Hinduism were each the religions of 0.1% of the population. A further 11.0% declared themselves non-religious or unaffiliated.
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
The clergy who joined the Russian Orthodox Church were spared the large-scale persecution of religion that occurred elsewhere in the country (see Religion in the Soviet Union). In the city of Lviv, only one church was closed (at a time when many cities in the rest of Ukraine did not have a working church). Moreover, the western dioceses of Lviv-Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk were the largest in the USSR and contained the majority of the Russian Orthodox Church's cloisters (particularly convents, of which there were seven in Ukrainian SSR but none in Russia). Orthodox canon law was also relaxed on the clergy allowing them to shave beards (a practice uncommon to Orthodoxy) and conduct liturgy in Ukrainian as opposed to Church Slavonic.