Although Catholicism has existed in Russia since the visit of a bishop to Kiev in 961, the first Catholic churches appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg only during the reign of Peter the Great, in the 1770s. Over the centuries, the government's attitude

Statistics collected in the mid 1990s have shown that there are around 400,000 Catholics in Russia, with another three million people stating that they come from Catholic families, but do not practise any religion. The numbers are thought to have declined since. Nevertheless, the religion has become more widely accepted and more centralised.

At the beginning of perestroika in the late 1980s, there were only 10 registered Catholic parishes in the whole of the USSR. By 1995, this number had risen to 202. To this day, many Catholic parishes outside Moscow do not have their own churches or prayer halls. Most of them meet in apartments, which have been specifically blessed so as to be suitable for communal prayer.

Most Russian Catholics are of Polish, German or Baltic descent. There have been cases of Russians shifting away from the Orthodox Church to Catholicism, although instances of this are rare. Another predominant presence amongst Russian parishes are Armenian Catholics, who represent a schism from Oriental Orthodoxy.

However, members of other, more obscure, orders also exist. The St. Pius X brotherhood, an extremely conservative splinter faction of the Catholic Church, gained substantial popularity in Moscow in the early 1990s. Its members, mostly recruited from prestigious universities, caused division among Russian Catholics. They called for a return towards “true Western values” which, according to them, had been forgotten since the Russian Catholic association had shifted away from such practices as reading prayers in Latin.

The brotherhood condemns the idea that all confessions are equal and focuses on attempt to save the souls of those they consider “wrong-believers”. The wider Catholic community reacts very painfully to their activities, considering them to be overly pompous and too fond of “sickly erotic representations of the caints”. Although very small in number (currently, the St. Pius X brotherhood numbers just over 30 members) the order is very pro-active.

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