Very few Catholic churches were built in Orthodox Moscow. In addition, some of the churches erected before the revolution were torn away during the Soviet period and have not yet been returned to believers. Today, Catholic churches and chapels in the Russian capital can be counted on one hand.
The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is located in Moscow on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. A church on this site began to be built in 1899, when there were about 30 thousand Catholics in the city, and there were clearly not enough churches. The construction was financed on a voluntary basis - with donations, so the construction was delayed for almost 12 years. The grand opening took place in December 1911. The repressions of the Soviet period fully affected this church - in 1938 the services in it were stopped, the priest was shot, the spire and turrets were demolished, the organ was destroyed, and several institutions moved into the building divided into four floors. The initiator of the process of returning the church to believers in the 90s of the last century was the Moscow Catholic Association "Dom Polskiy". A hundred years after the foundation of the church on this site, in December 1999, the restoration of the temple was completed, and it received the status of a cathedral. And in 2005, an organ was again installed in it - a gift from the Basel Lutheran Cathedral. Today services in it are held in many languages - from Church Slavonic to Armenian and Korean.
On Malaya Lubyanka in Moscow, there is the Church of St. Louis of the French with two abbots - Russian and French. It was built at the initiative of the French government with the permission of Empress Catherine II. The process of building the temple began in 1789, and on November 24, 1835, it was solemnly consecrated. Divine services in this cathedral did not stop even during the Soviet period. Over the years, the temple was visited by the French presidents Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Konrad Adenauer and the Polish president Lech Walesa. The masses in this temple are also multilingual, using Russian, French, English, Italian, Lithuanian, Vietnamese and Latin.
Relatively recently, in 2003, the parish of St. Olga was allocated a House of Culture in Kirov Passage. Here it was decided to found the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Princess Olga. Reconstruction works are still underway, but this is already a functioning temple, which receives parishioners every day.
Moscow also has the Chapel of the Community of Spanish-Portuguese-speaking Catholics in Volkov Lane, the Chapel of the Community of German Catholics on Prospekt Vernadsky and the Chapel on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.
