Church of St. Louis of France

On Malaya Lubyanka Street stands the Catholic Church of St. Louis of France — today only three such parishes operate in the capital, and this is one of them. Services are held in five different languages, from Russian and French to Vietnamese, and the parish runs a Sunday school and a scouting movement.

The first attempts to open a French Catholic parish in Moscow date back to the 17th century, but for a long time people of other faiths were denied the right to their own churches. Only after the Russian-French trade treaty of 1786, which granted French subjects freedom of worship, did the Moscow French community obtain permission to build. A small wooden church was consecrated on 30 March 1791 in honor of the crusader king Louis IX. Two years later, after the execution of Louis XVI, relations soured: the church was forbidden to call itself French, and its first rector was expelled from the country.

The fire of 1812 spared the building, and already in the 1820s, funded by parishioners’ donations and a low-interest loan from the Russian treasury, construction began on a stone building designed by architect Domenico Gilardi. Construction was completed by 1830, though the solemn consecration took place only in 1849. By 1917 the parish numbered about 2,700 people — a sizeable Catholic community for its time.

After the revolution, hard times fell on the church: its property was nationalized, parishioners were persecuted, and in 1921 the rector was forced to leave the country. In 1926 several Catholic bishops were secretly ordained here, which triggered new reprisals against the community. After the closure of Moscow’s other Catholic churches in 1933 and 1938, the Church of St. Louis of France remained the city’s only functioning Catholic church. During the Great Patriotic War, American priest Leopold Braun continued to serve here, reporting to the Vatican on the state of the Church in the USSR — he did not leave Moscow until late 1945.

The building was built in the late Empire style as a three-nave basilica with a semicircular apse; the façade is adorned with a six-column portico topped by a triangular pediment, flanked by two low bell towers. Inside, sculptures of France’s patron saints have survived — Joan of Arc and Thérèse of Lisieux — along with a rare stained-glass window depicting St. Joseph that outlasted the Soviet decades. The first organ appeared in the church back in the 1850s, and in 1900 it was replaced by a new instrument from the French firm Didier-Van Caster of Nancy.

A new period in the parish’s history began in 1991, when Pope John Paul II established the Apostolic Administration for Catholics of European Russia. Today the church on Malaya Lubyanka is a multinational, multilingual parish that unites the Catholic community of the Russian capital and preserves the memory of nearly four centuries of Catholic history in Moscow.