The Catholic Church in Russia To-Day

Extract

This little book is the only one which deals with the present position of the Catholic Church in Russia, and it is a good book, well-written, and filled with valuable information which is not to be found elsewhere.

Miss Almedingen is a young Russian lady, a graduate of Petrograd University, and a convert to Catholicism from Orthodoxy. She was received into the Church by the late Mgr. Budkiewicz; and the touching story she tells in Appendix II is probably the story of her own conversion. Otherwise there is an utter absence of the personal note, and perhaps this is just as well; but some day, I hope, the authoress will be persuaded to tell the story of her own life in Russia during the Red Terror: if she does tell it, I can promise the English reader that it will surpass in interest most of the fiction that has been written for years.

Miss Almedingen gives a short but very interesting account of the Catholic churches in Petrograd and Moscow, and especially of Mgr. Budkiewicz’s church of St. Catherine on the Nevsky Prospect. St. Catherine’s was built for the Dominicans at the end of the eighteenth century, but afterwards passed into the hands of the Jesuits, who collected in the great library attached to the church (and which still contains a magnificent full-length portrait of the Angelic Doctor) over two hundred thousand books, many of them extremely valuable.