Catholic Church of St Catherine

The Basilica of St Catherine of Alexandria at 32–34 Nevsky Prospekt is one of the oldest Catholic churches in Russia and a landmark of classicist architecture. Since 2013 it has been the only church in the country to hold the honorary status of minor basilica, and its parish belongs to the Archdiocese of the Mother of God based in Moscow.

The Catholic community of St Catherine took shape in St Petersburg in 1716, and Empress Anna Ioannovna signed permission to build a stone church on Nevsky Prospekt in 1738. The first design began to be realised by architect Pietro Antonio Trezzini, but construction stopped after he left for his homeland in 1751. A new version, in the French academic classicist manner, was drawn up by the architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe — it was he who conceived the idea of a deep portal set between two identical towers; the new building's foundation stone was laid in 1761. After his departure for France, the work was continued from 1779 by the Italian Antonio Rinaldi, and construction was completed by the architect Giuseppe Minciacchi — the church was consecrated on 7 October 1783 in honour of St Catherine, patron saint of the reigning empress.

The building is laid out in the form of a Latin cross with a transept and is crowned with a dome; it is 44 metres long, 25 metres wide and 42 metres high, with a capacity of about two thousand people. The main façade is marked by a recessed arched portal on freestanding columns — a device typical of Roman Catholic churches — flanked by pilasters. The windows of the second tier are oval, and the façade is crowned by a parapet with figures of the four evangelists and angels holding a cross; above the entrance is a Latin quotation from the Gospel of Matthew.

The church's history is bound up with well-known figures: in 1798 the last king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Stanisław August Poniatowski, was buried here, and in 1813 the French Marshal Jean Victor Moreau, mortally wounded at Dresden. The architect Auguste de Montferrand was a parishioner of the church, and here in 1859 the future architect Fyodor Shekhtel was baptised. Various monastic orders served at the church in turn — Franciscans, then Jesuits, then Dominicans; before the revolution the parish numbered more than thirty thousand people.

During the Soviet years the church was subjected to devastation: its rector, Konstantin Budkevich, was shot in 1923, and in 1938 the church was closed and plundered, its vestments and the books of its enormous parish library thrown out into the street. A fire in 1947 and an act of arson in 1984, which occurred while the building was already being restored to serve as an organ hall for the Philharmonic, destroyed almost all its decoration — sculpture, murals, marble altars and an old organ. The building was returned to believers only in 1992, and restoration has since stretched over decades: the main nave was consecrated in 2008, and in 2013 the church was granted the status of minor basilica.

Today the basilica runs a Sunday school and a parish choir, and hosts concerts and meetings with figures from the world of culture. Having survived centuries of building vicissitudes and Soviet-era devastation, the church remains an architectural landmark of Nevsky Prospekt and the spiritual centre of St Petersburg's Catholic community.